Too much content kills content! The SEO trend of producing articles en masse, often of poor quality, to rank at the top of search engines is starting to decline and fortunately...
The expected result was far from conclusive, even counterproductive since these web pages, the so-called zombie pages, end up overshadowing quality content.
If you want to improve your visibility on Google, a bit of tidying up is necessary to prevent these zombie pages from cannibalizing the pages that hold authority.
How to recognize a zombie page?
A zombie page is a web page with very low traffic and an SEO score so low that it appears very far down in search results (or not at all!).
In the vast majority of cases, it is textual content that interests no one or that presents SEO problems.
More precisely, there are different types of zombie pages; here are the main ones:
- Low-quality content or content that doesn't meet your target audience's search intent: users judge the information as useless, false, or outdated.
- Non-responsive pages: your site is too slow and its load time discourages visitors, resulting in a poor user experience.
- Pages whose editorial purpose is unclear. Your visitors don't know whether it's a blog post, a product page, or a landing page…
- Pages that do not meet SEO criteria: absence of tags or of meta description, title too long, keywords irrelevant or duplicated…
- Orphan pages that are unreachable by crawling robots or that create what is called a "black mass" of useless URLs that Google has indexed (category pages, no tags, result pages…).
- Indexed pages, but excluded by bots.
- Supplementary pages: they provide no interest and add no value to your site. These are your contact pages, legal notice, terms of sale…
Why avoid zombie pages?
Simply because Google and your readers don't like them!
In organic search, the notion of quality content is extremely important. Google will assign your site a score called Quality Score.
The search engine assesses the quality of your site and its relevance.
Consequently, the more low-quality pages you have, the lower your score will be, which will strongly impact your ranking.
Moreover, since Google does not have infinite resources, it allocates a crawl budget to each site. This budget represents the number of pages crawled by Googlebot.
If the bot uses your quota to visit your zombie pages, it may not index a quality page.
Finally, a zombie page will drive your visitor away. Not only will your bounce rate skyrocket, but it will also have serious consequences for your brand image and reputation.
How to find zombie pages?
The first thing to do to detect useless pages and assess their SEO performance is to go to your Search Console.
- Start by checking which pages are not indexed or are indexed but excluded.
- List the pages that generate little traffic.
- Note the pages that have a high bounce rate.
- Then, test the page loading speed.
- Analyze the structure of your content: is the hN hierarchy respected? Your web linking is it relevant? Your backlinks do they come from sites with authority? Is your meta tag optimized?…
- Do an SEO audit on your target query: is your keyword relevant? Does your content sufficiently address users' needs? Is your text long enough?…
- You can also generate a sitemap to list tag pages.
What solutions should you adopt for your zombie pages?
Now you have a list of pages that may be substantial; you must now determine their value!
Start by reviewing your pages one by one, ignoring the most recently indexed pages—they simply haven’t had time to rank yet!
Next, remove from your list the ancillary pages that cannot be processed, as well as your category pagination pages that cannot be redirected.
Then, sort your zombie pages by category and proceed in order:
1. Optimize the SEO of your pages
This involves improving both on-page and off-page SEO as a whole:
- Review all your tags and meta tags.
- Improve the quality of your photos and videos.
- Test your keywords and make sure you use those that will bring you the most traffic.
- Substantiate your semantic field.
- Work on your internal linking and check that your links point to active pages.
- Share your content on social media.
- Try to acquire backlinks.
- Optimize the page's UX.
2. Improve content quality
To improve your content per se, start by checking whether your information is still up to date.
The tips and tricks you wrote may be outdated. Your content must be rich and unique to engage both your readers and Google.
Don’t hesitate to rewrite or expand your texts if necessary!
3. Address technical issues
If your content isn’t the issue, look into the technical aspects:
- Improve your page loading time by compressing your images, for example.
- Add links to orphan pages.
- Check your 404 error pages and include a relevant access link (previous page, homepage, related page…).
- Optimize your robots.txt file to tell crawlers which pages to index.
- Make crawlers' job easier with an sitemap optimized file by leaving only pages, posts and categories (remove tags and archives from your file).
- Improve your site's structure so search engines more easily understand your site's purpose and crawlers can navigate more smoothly.
- Configure your structured data so Google understands the topic of your content.
- Make your site responsive so it adapts to all screens.
- Switch your pages to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) so they load quickly on mobile devices.
4. Merge related pages
It’s not uncommon, especially on very large sites, to find related topics or pages covering the same theme.
It then makes sense to consolidate your pages into a single, much more powerful page.
Test their potential to determine which should be kept and delete the useless pages, remembering to create a 301 redirect.
5. Remove URLs
You might be tempted to delete zombie pages and keep only the best. However, deleting pages can have a very negative impact on your SEO.
Only consider deleting it as a last resort and after carefully weighing your choice.
If your URL has never been indexed or you believe your page is truly useless, then delete it.
Be sure beforehand that no internal link points to the deleted page to avoid 404 errors.
- Either set up a 301 redirect to similar content if your page has valuable inbound links, thus preserving your page.
- Or opt for a 410 to remove it permanently.
How to prevent new zombie pages?
Knowing how to spot and handle a zombie page is one thing, but to improve your site's ranking in Google search, it's preferable to avoid creating future zombie pages.
Here are some tips for your next page creations:
- Check that your future URL does not already exist by doing a Google search.
- Do an organic search for the targeted phrase.
- Optimize your title tag to avoid a SEO cannibalization.
- Write unique, informative, and original content and check that your text is not duplicate content before publishing it.
Our advice
As you can see, avoiding zombie pages is a tedious task.
Nevertheless, there are free tools like Google Analytics that will let you generate automatic reports on your useless pages.
However, the most effective solution is to create quality content from the start, and for that our site contains the best professional web copywriterss!
