Organic SEO Audit: Zombie Pages

One of the strategies that people often overlook and undermine for Search Engine Rankings and search engine performance is the removal of "zombie pages." These are the pages that are indexed by search engines on your website, but they give your visitor and traffic from SEO, the least or no value. In fact, they may be the ones behind the stagnation of the website by lowering its content quality and by confusing search engines as to which pages are the most important.

The current post should hopefully provide more insights on the steps to take in order to detect and delete zombie pages, which, in return, will result in you making your website operate smoother, faster, enhance your user experience and as a result, get more traffic to your site organically.

Find and delete “Zombie Pages”

Nowadays when people talk about SEO, the general thought is that ‘the more the content, the more the results’ This is not completely accurate. These so-called "zombie pages" that are completely irrelevant and of the lowest quality can impact your website negatively. Figuring out and removing these zombie pages is arguable the most important part in your search engine optimization journey.

A best practice would be to run your website in the search bar of Google and get the data on how many pages you have indexed. You may have more indexed pages than you had foreseen. Most of the times, the over indexed pages have a 50-80% higher percentage than the expected ones, mostly due to these zombie pages.

A good use case is a site owner from the United States who eliminated more than 9000 zombie pages from his website and the result was that the website's traffic made an increase of nearly 50% in an extremely short period of time.

How to find and remove undead pages are the given tasks:

1. Find Zombie pages:

   1. Search Engines First: Begin by searching your website on Google to learn how many pages have been indexed. This offers a primary count and allows you to identify any new pages

   2. Content Audit: Conduct a deep analysis of your content to locate outdated, repetitive, or low-quality pages
      

2.  Some common Zombie page examples:

   1. Archive pages: Old blog archive that is irrelevant anymore

   2. Search Result Pages: The internal search result pages that inundate your site over time

   3. Old Press Releases: The news releases of the past that no longer add are relevant

   4. Boilerplate Content: General content that is copied on several pages and is repetitive

   5. Category and Tag Pages: Unwanted category or tag pages that are not unique

   6. Thin Content:  The pages which have less than 50 words and are not helpful

      
      

3. Erase or redraw undead pages:

   1. Removal: Take the time to extract and remove the pages that do not serve any purpose.

   2. 301 Redirects: For the pages that have a little value but are obsolete, use 301 redirects to direct users to newer, more relevant content.

This will unclog your site of unnecessary pages and make it more accessible to the search engines to crawl and index your most important content effectively. While the practice further boosts your SEO performance, it also paves the way for an improved user experience.

Our upcoming post will focus on methods to find and fix indexing problems by utilizing tools such as Googles Search Consoles “Index Coverage” report and the SEO tool ‘Screaming Frog’ which is free

This will help you verifying the accuracy of the pages that have been indexed and/or Google indexing the right pages on the site.

See you on the next post.