Zombie pages in SEO: How to spot and treat them?
Zombie pages hurt your SEO and are useless for your website. Despite your best efforts to improve them, they hinder the effectiveness of your website by hiding in the background.
Are you improving your website and offering quality content, yet your SEO remains the same or decreases? Maybe because of the zombie pages! But how to recognize and treat them?
zombie pages: what are they?
A low-quality and uninteresting page is called a “zombie page,” which also hurts your SEO.
Typically, these pages suffer from poor seo services for ecommerce websites and receive little to no traffic or conversion. They offer nothing and systematically harm the performance of your site.
They’re not called “zombie pages” for nothing.
- Inadequate technological optimization
- Bad marking
- Bad user experience (UX)
- Insufficient content, etc.
They waste resources that are readily available (server bandwidth and search engine crawling budget). However, they have no impact on conversion or the purchasing process.
Naturally, neither Google nor your visitors like them. A large number of zombie pages indicates that your website has many low-quality pages.
This will be seen by Google, which will then consider your site to be of low quality.
Why is it necessary to take care of it?
Google will evaluate your site as a whole, even if each page has separate SEO value.
The performance of all your pages will suffer if you have a large number of zombie pages. The more zombie pages there are, the lower your site rankings.
On the other hand, your SEO will be improved if you have less. For your website, removing or fixing zombie pages has a number of book marketing agency in usa benefits:
- An improved user experience. The user experience on your site will be improved if zombie pages are identified and addressed. This will increase site traffic, reduce bounce rates and improve conversion rates.
- A better quality index. Your website’s quality score will increase if zombie pages are eliminated or significantly reduced. Its position in search engine results will increase accordingly.
- Crawl optimization. Google will have fewer pages to index if zombie pages do not exist. It will work to better understand your themes and optimize the way essential pages on your site are crawled.
Types of Zombie Pages
Zombies appear on a variety of web pages. The majority of them are:
Poor quality content pages
Pages with poor quality content are usually penalized and slowly drop in the SERPs. We make the difference:
- Pages containing outdated information. Specifically, pages whose content hasn’t been updated in a while. These could be landing pages, press releases, news articles, etc. which are no longer up to date.
- Pages containing little information (less than 300 words).
- Pages whose content is not particularly compelling.
Non-indexed pages
Typically, these pages have technical issues.
This could be for example:
- Scripts not running
- or poor quality code that takes a long time to load.
Google may decide not to index the type of pages that slow down its crawlers. They don’t appear in search results and don’t get organic traffic.
Pages that need SEO optimization
These are web pages that do not respect SEO standards (lack of keywords, Hn, Alt tags, etc., optimized title, etc.).
These pages do not perform well in search engine results, even though they may contain fascinating material.
Other pages
In addition to these pages, there are other types of zombie pages, including the following:
Test or draft pages can be created, published and never deleted.
Pages that are not available through the menu and are not internally linked to other pages are called orphan pages.
The additional pages (legal notices, contacts, T&Cs, etc.) are not zombie pages, it should be noted. Since they carry legal information, their absence harms SEO.
How do you know if a page is a zombie?
Using SEO tools is the best technique to identify zombie pages on your website.
The RM Tech tool has features that make it easy to spot pages that are harming your SEO. However, implementing such a program requires time and a very good understanding of SEO.
If you don’t have all of these resources, it would be wiser – although potentially counterproductive – to hire an SEO company.
Use Google Search Console
We recommend using Google Search Console if you still want to perform this task manually.
You can access reports on the effectiveness of each of the indexed pages on your site using the “Performance” tab. To identify pages whose traffic is constantly declining, you can examine the evolution of traffic on each of your pages.
Consider traffic over a minimum of one year for a better analysis. This will help you avoid deleting or editing recent pages that haven’t had a chance to establish themselves or pages whose performance changes depending on the season.
You can review the following items in the “Excluded” tab (coverage + excluded):
- Pages that Google crawled but did not index due to inadequate, redundant, or non-value-added elements.
- Pages that Google has found, but which have not yet been indexed due to technical difficulties.
Once you have identified the zombie pages on your website, it is a good idea to examine each one separately to determine the best course of action in each situation.
How to deal with zombie pages?
You have several options, depending on the circumstances, for dealing with zombie pages on your website. While some pages can simply be edited, others must be deleted.
Update these pages
Most often, zombie pages are due to inadequate content, forgetting the internal linking or poor optimization. To make them interesting for Google and your visitors, simply update them. You can, for example: – Add text to these pages, modify it and improve it in any other way.
- Optimize the tags and titles of these pages by adding relevant keywords and increasing the semantic richness of the text.
- Improve internal links by adding links to other pages on the site.
- Use outbound links to define your sources.
- Improve user experience (UX) and load times.
- Use properly optimized images or videos.
- Add structured data.
- Promote these pages by emailing, posting, and tweeting about them.
- Include structured data
- Promote these pages by sending emails, posting on social media, etc.
Deindex these pages
Some pages should not be indexed, but due to a problematic setting of a CMS like WordPress, they are.
Others are useful for various SEO purposes but are considered zombies because they are indexed. This is often the case for author pages, tags, article categories, etc.
Your visitors should always be able to view these pages. It is therefore preferable to deindex them because they have no positive impact on your SEO. Assuming internal links are still intact, that.
You then need to decide whether it is important to prevent crawlers from accessing the deindexed page (robot.txt file).
Just delete them.
The best technique for getting rid of a zombie page is deletion. But as it is a delicate operation, each situation must be treated individually.
Feel free to eliminate the aforementioned zombie page if it lacks content, results in no conversions, and doesn’t improve your SEO.
However, even if they receive little traffic, important sections such as GDPR, general conditions of sale or legal notices must always be maintained.
Attention! When removing a page from a website, it is crucial to set up a 301 or 410 redirect.
When a user tries to view a deleted page, the 301 redirect is used to send them to another page. By doing this, you can prevent your website from producing 404 errors, which are detrimental to your SEO.
The 301 redirect also notifies Google that another page has permanently taken the place of the original page. However, make sure that the new page covers the same subject as the one that was deleted.
Set up a 410 redirect if a 301 redirect is not possible.
By doing this, you are letting Google know that the URL has been permanently removed and will not be replaced. If you choose this approach, make sure no other links connect to this page.