You have done everything to have a quality website and you have worked on many contents. However, your SEO performance is not taking off, or even worse, it is regressing? You may be a victim of zombie pages! We explain why and how to get rid of it!
Definition of the zombie page in SEO
To explain it very simply, a zombie page is a page of very poor quality, which has little interest and which will penalize your SEO by “nibbling” your SEO performance over time.
Zombie pages are pages that accumulate SEO problems while having very little success in terms of traffic and conversion.
They are therefore useless and even worse, they will drag your site’s performance down!
Zombie pages are well named!
In the collective imagination, zombies are slow, not really beautiful and they often lack more or less important pieces. They wander around aimlessly and think only of devouring everything that passes within their reach.
Zombie pages are technically poorly optimized, have an often mediocre UX, and lack content, proper markup, etc. They are generally of no interest in the context of the website. They generally have no interest in the buying process or for conversion and therefore consume unnecessary resources (search engine crawl budget and server bandwidth).
Like in the TV series, a zombie here and there is manageable, but a horde is more complicated! Take care of your zombie pages regularly to avoid critical consequences on your SEO!
Why is dealing with zombie pages important for your SEO?
There’s nothing like a concrete example to understand this point!
So let’s do a test together:
How many pages do you think you have on your site? 20? 50? 100? More?
Now, type the query: site:yourdomainname on Google.
You get the number of pages on your site that have actually been indexed by Google!
And here, I am sure you are very surprised by the result for your site!
And yes! We often think that a website is only the home page, the presentation of the company, its offer and the blog articles.
However, Google will index many other pages that sometimes you did not even suspect the existence!
And unfortunately, these pages are often low quality pages that fall into the category of zombie pages.
The most common types of zombie pages
Category pages of your blog posts
Tag pages
Author pages
Search results and pagination pages
…
If you use a CMS like WordPress, these pages are often created automatically. The problem is that if you have not paid attention to the settings of your CMS and/or your theme and plugins, it is possible that you have given Google the opportunity to visit and index these low quality pages.
Apart from pages created and indexed unintentionally, there are also zombie pages such as
Pages with very little content (less than 100 words)
Old news articles or press releases
Old landing pages that are no longer used
Tests or drafts of pages published but never deleted
…
Why Google does not like zombie pages?
As a reminder, it is important to understand that in SEO Google judges a site as a whole.
Each of your pages is obviously treated individually, but in the end it is really the overall quality of your site that will most influence the performance of your SEO.
Do you understand the problem with zombie pages?
If you have too many zombie pages, the performance of all your pages will be impacted.
The higher the ratio of zombie pages to “healthy” pages, the more your site will be judged negatively by Google, and the more complicated it will be to rank your pages in the first positions.
On the contrary, getting rid of zombie pages can have a huge impact on your SEO performance and therefore on your traffic and conversions!
Indeed, Google will be able to focus on fewer pages and optimize the crawl of your site (= detect and index correctly the pages of your site and their updates) and its understanding of your themes and your expertise.
Dealing with zombie pages also allows you to improve the architecture of your site and to keep an optimal tree structure between the different pages of your sites.
It is therefore important to first identify these pages to be able to take the necessary decisions!
How to identify zombie pages on a website?
Ideally we advise you to use SEO tools like RM Tech to easily identify pages that penalize your SEO via their content auditing features.
Be careful! Performing this type of analysis without a dedicated tool is time consuming and requires good SEO knowledge to avoid being counterproductive!
You can still use the “Performance” tab of Google Search Console or Google Analytics to detect your zombie pages manually.
To do this, use the reports to get the list of indexed pages of your site and then analyze those that generate the least traffic.
In order not to modify/delete performing pages, make sure to analyze the traffic over a wide period of at least one year. This way you will be sure not to touch pages that are too new and may not have revealed their full SEO potential yet, or pages that are highly dependent on seasonality.
Once you’ve identified those pages with poor SEO performance, take the time to analyze each of these pages individually. Depending on the page, you can make one or more of the decisions discussed in the next section.
How to deal with zombie pages on a website?
Depending on the case, several solutions can be offered to deal with zombie pages:
#1 – De-index the page
Paging pages or search results pages should not be indexed. Sometimes, due to bad settings on CMS such as WordPress, they can be crawled and then indexed by Google.
It is also possible that some pages on your site are currently indexed and considered zombies, but you need them for reasons unrelated to your SEO.
This may be the case for your article category pages, tags, authors or any other page with too short content, low quality and no interest for your SEO.
For this type of pages, which must remain accessible to Internet users, we advise you to de-index them.
#2 – Optimize or redesign the page
Sometimes it happens that a page becomes a zombie page because it is simply badly optimized.
If it has a real interest in the buying path of your prospects and it does not perform for technical reasons, you can optimize it. It will come out of the zombie category when it starts generating SEO traffic.
To do this, start by identifying the search intent that the page should address.
Then, update and complete the content of that page around that intent, with text, media, and consider internal linking to other related articles.
Similarly, consider adding links on other pages and articles to this page.
Finally, make sure you optimize your title and image tags. This way you will help Google to understand and correctly reference your page.
#3 – Simply delete the page!
This solution is the most drastic but also the most effective to get rid of a zombie page!
If the zombie page really has no SEO potential, nor interest for the user, then it is better to delete it.
But be careful! On a website, you don’t delete a page without making sure you have done a 301 redirect or a 410 link beforehand.
A 301 redirect is the fact of redirecting a page A to a page B. In other words, after a redirect, if you click on a link or type in the url of page A, you will automatically be directed to page B.
Redirects help to avoid generating 404 errors on your website (which are detrimental to SEO). The 301 redirect tells Google that a url is definitely replaced by another one.
In this way, the page will eventually not be visited by Google’s robots and will not be indexed anymore, in favor of the new page.
Think of redirecting the page to be deleted to a page with a content related to that of this page.
If none of your pages meet this criterion, prefer to redirect a 410 code. By doing so, you indicate to Google that this page has been permanently and voluntarily removed.