In SEO, a zombie page is a page that exists on your site but gives no real value to either users or search engines. These pages can become inactive and useless because of low-quality content, no traffic, or never being updated, and they end up hurting your site’s overall performance too.
How Do Zombie Pages Hurt Your Site’s SEO?
They Lower Your Site’s Overall Quality
Google’s algorithms, like the Helpful Content System, are constantly evaluating your site’s content quality. Say your site has 1,000 pages and 900 of them are zombie pages, that means only 10 percent of your content is actually good quality, so naturally Google might rank a site that maybe only has 100 useful pages higher than you.
Wasting Your Crawl Budget (crawl budget)
Every site has a set budget for being crawled by search engines. For example, Google might only crawl a thousand of your pages once a week. Zombie pages waste this budget, and instead of crawling your quality pages, search engines spend their time on these worthless, low-quality ones.
A Higher Bounce Rate
These pages usually aren’t appealing to users, so people leave them right away. That pushes your page’s bounce rate up, and a high bounce rate can be a negative signal for the ranking algorithms.
Less User Engagement
Zombie pages reduce how much users engage with your site. These pages often have no useful information, no appealing design, not even a proper structure, so users are less inclined to stick around on your site.
How Do You Identify Zombie Pages?
Check Page Traffic
With tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can find pages that get very little traffic or none at all. A lot of the time, these zero-traffic or low-traffic pages are exactly your zombie pages.
Check Old Content
Content that hasn’t been updated in a long time, isn’t evergreen content, and no longer offers relevant or valuable information can be a zombie page.
Evaluate the Links
Pages that have few internal and external links overall, or none at all, are probably zombie pages. On top of that, pages that have no links pointing to them and aren’t in the sitemap either are more than 90 percent likely to be zombie pages.
4. Use Specialized Tools
Tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs can help you spot your low-value pages.
How to Fight the Zombie Horde
By now you’ve realized you need to fight these zombies, and here are the tools you can use to go to war with your zombie pages:
Update and Improve the Content
Some zombie pages can be saved by making a few changes to the content and adding new information, for example:
- Adding up-to-date stats and figures.
- Writing more detailed and comprehensive explanations.
- Making the content more useful for users.
- Using engaging images and videos.
Delete Unnecessary Pages
This is the point where there’s no cure left and you have to grab your weapon and shoot the zombie. If a page is completely worthless and there’s no way to improve it, it’s better to delete it and deliver the final blow with a 410 (Gone) code to tell Google this page is no longer available.
Redirect
If a page gets little traffic but its topic is related to another page, you can redirect its traffic to that related page. For example, say you have a solid page for running shoes and a low-traffic one for cheap running shoes, it might be better to delete the cheap running shoes page and redirect its traffic to the running shoes page. Or if a product model has gone permanently out of stock and you’ve replaced it with another product, you can use this redirect too. Just make sure you use a 301 redirect for this so the move is permanent.
Build Internal Links to Zombie Pages
Some zombie pages might actually have decent content but go unseen because of poor link building, heavy competition, and so on. The least you can do is send them more traffic through internal linking and references. For example, if you have a page with a comprehensive guide to choosing running shoes that’s become a zombie page, you can link to it from some of your other posts.
Focus on UGC
You can breathe new life into a zombie page by adding user reviews, UGC, and comment marketing.
Conclusion
Managing zombie pages, especially on e-commerce sites with a wide variety of products and pages, is one of the most essential things you can do to keep your site’s SEO healthy. Identifying and either removing or improving these pages not only improves the user experience, it also boosts your ranking in search engines.