Killing Zombie Pages and Breathing New Life into Old Content

Identifying Zombie Pages
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There’s nothing like a good zombie film, but did you know that the zombies that lurk on your website could be damaging your SEO and turning away potential business? In this article, I will look at the concept of zombie pages and the benefits of removing them from your website, so read on to find out how to maximise your online profile and grow your business.

Zombie pages are pages or blogs on your website that are not pulling their weight. Perhaps some of your pages are not driving much traffic, but they are still present on your website so they are indexed by Google. We call these zombie pages, and killing them off can make a big difference to the way your website performs.

Google takes into account the overall quality of content on your website, so if you have a big website with hundreds or even thousands of pages, you should identify the pages that do not bring in traffic and safely remove these pages or blogs from your website.

 

Common types of zombie pages:

  • Outdated information. There are millions of websites out there that are littered with blogs or pages that are no longer current or relevant. One such example could be COVID-19 blogs or pages that were put on your website during the pandemic and are no longer relevant. These pages should be removed.
  • Press releases that are no longer relevant or necessary. You may have created press releases when people joined your team, for instance, and they may subsequently have left but the page remains on your website or blog. This is no longer relevant and should be removed from your website.
  • Topics that are no longer searched for or are obsolete. If we look again at the example of COVID-19, we can see that companies that were selling face masks were leading the way at this time but these are no longer relevant to most people so can be considered obsolete and removed from your site.
  • Landing pages for old marketing campaigns. Many marketing teams make mistakes here, running a time-bound campaign for a period of a few months, at which point the page is removed from the navigation and home page but still sits there in the back end of your content management system. If you’re not going to be resuming that particular campaign, it’s better to remove the page completely.
  • Product pages for products that are no longer available. This is self-explanatory, as products that are no longer available will simply clutter up your site.
  • Low-quality content. Content that is too short to be valuable or informative, especially if it is below 100 or even 300 words, is common zombie territory. If you are not covering a topic in enough depth to realistically rank for it, it can be removed from your website without issue. This includes all content that is poorly written and does not engage readers, especially if it has a lot of spelling mistakes, typos or grammatical errors. If this is the case, it either needs to be removed or improved.
  • Duplicated content. If you have two blogs on a similar topic, they can affect each other and you should remove the one which is performing less effectively.
  • Tags and category pages. For WordPress websites, the tags and category pages provide value in navigating your way around the website but provide little to no benefit from an SEO perspective and can be removed.

Getting rid of your zombie pages will increase traffic to your website and streamline your online presence, but it must be done correctly to avoid causing further problems. Read on to find out how.

 

Zombie page removal

There is a simple process for removing zombie pages from your website, beginning with a content audit in which you decide which pages to keep and which to kill. To start, download a master list of pages from Google Search, Google Analytics or your SEO tool of choice. Then you should refine this list to take out the key pages such as your home page, services page, category and product pages if relevant. You should also include important legal pages that are required for your business even though they do not bring in much traffic, such as your privacy page and your terms and conditions.

Having removed the essentials, you can audit the rest of your pages, looking at the KPIs, including the overall traffic and conversions, the organic traffic and backlinks that point to that particular page. Using Google Sheets, allocate a column to denote outdated information, a column for pinned content and a column for duplicate content. Finally, you’ll need a column for a drop down menu of various actions, to show what action you are going to take. This could be:

  1. Repurposing or consolidating – remove the content from your website but using the content to inspire some social media posts, for instance
  2. Updating the content to drive traffic
  3. No-Index
  4. Removing the page and redirecting to the next most appropriate page.

 

Zombie Page Content Audit
Sample Zombie Page Content Audit

 

You can see an example of this process using Google Sheets here, and you can see on the tab with the refined list of pages that you have your URL, your various columns for metrics, columns that help you decide what to do and then finally your last column which shows the step you will take for each page.

Remember that when you are removing zombie pages from your website, a gradual process is best. If you have identified 100, or 1000, pages that need removing, do not attempt to do this all at once as this is much more likely to cause a problem for your website. Instead, you can make zombie page removal a monthly action and remove a number of pages at a time, but not too many.

You should always check the internal links pointing to the pages you are removing and change them afterwards. Finally, when you have removed pages, you should use your SEO tool of choice to run an audit which will pick up broken links so you can change those to point to another page. During your content audit, take note of pages that will date, such as blogs that are specific to a certain year or time of year, and make a note to update this content to keep it relevant and avoid content decay (more on that later!).

 

Bringing Zombie Pages Back to Life

If, while getting rid of your useless zombie pages, you have discovered old pages that are still relevant or could be useful but are not currently driving traffic to your site, these can be used to your advantage.

A top insider tip is to take a look at the pages that are in positions four to ten, and eleven to twenty on your website. I use SE Ranking to do this, and you can use any SEO tool to do the same. This helps us to identify essential keywords that are ranking on Google page one, and tells us where we need to refresh content to move up a few positions in the rankings. Here, you’re giving yourself a headstart, like beginning a mountain climb from halfway up, by re-using old content and optimising it for effectiveness. Optimising ten old blogs, for instance, will bring a lot more traffic to your website than writing ten new blogs.

 

SE Ranking Screenshot

The process works strategically, as you will already be ranking on page one of Google with your pages in positions four to ten. For those pages in positions eleven to twenty, we’re looking at page two – and we know that not many of us are clicking through to page two of a Google search. Bringing these pages up in quality and relevance will make a big difference to your traffic if you can get them onto page one in searches, so it’s a good idea to review these pages and list them in terms of business impact. You will need to be ruthless here, considering where improvements in SEO will make a difference and focusing on these, ideally picking three to five pages to work on. Using content optimisation and analytics tools like SurferSEO, we can identify areas for improvement and measure against your competitors. This will help to identify content you’re missing, keywords you should include, article length and page speed. This gives you a great place to start improving the quality of your content to drive more traffic.

 

Priority Pages to Update

 

When you’re updating your content, it’s a great opportunity to demonstrate EEAT, particularly with blog content. You should include proof of experience and expertise in Author bios, which should be included in every post. Blogs should contain personal experience and humanised content – don’t forget we’re in competition with AI now! But nothing beats personal experience so don’t be afraid to focus on the details and include images and information that relate to your subject. For instance, if you’re writing an article about travelling to India, you’ll need to make sure it stands out with personal experience and details that only someone who has been to India would know.

If you’re working on an old blog, you’ll need to update the references, and it’s essential to ensure that these are trustworthy sources. Use your own images and video content wherever you can, even if that means adapting stock images with tools such as Canva. And don’t forget that video is leading the way right now!

 

Beating the Zombies

We’ve probably all seen zombie films and can recall the time delay that occurs when someone gets bitten, before they become a zombie themselves. The SEO equivalent of this is content decay, and we can resolve it!

Content decay is the term used to describe the ongoing decline in traffic and rankings for a blog or webpage, referring to content that previously performed well but is now losing traffic and is not ranking as well.

Content decay can be caused by:

  • Content age. Older content lacks freshness and may be outdated, so will not rank as well in Google searches. Newer resources will be favoured, so you will need to update your content to stay relevant.
  • Duplicate content issues. If you had a piece of content that was performing well and later created another piece that cannibalised the original by being too similar, for instance, you should identify which page is of the least important and remove it.
  • Competitors using keywords more effectively. If your competition is ranking better than you, this may be because they are doing a better job with a specific keyword and you can find out more by examining this with a tool like Surfer, identifying areas of opportunity to get your content back in the lead.
  • A shift in search intent. This can be a tricky problem to resolve. For example, the zombie apocalypse we all knew as COVID-19 made a huge difference to search intent, as the world scrabbled to find hand sanitiser and faces masks. The pandemic is over, so search intent has now changed and hand sanitiser will no longer be enough to sustain a business model.

 

Identifying content decay is easy to do, and you can use Ben Goodey’s content decay calculator to help you with this. I recommend using Google Search Console to filter your search results for the past month, and this can be filtered by country. Simply export this to Google Sheets, copy and paste the top pages and click columns into the content decay calculator. You can repeat this process using data from the last six months and this will enable you to scan through your pages to see which are losing traffic month over month, highlighting these as an example of content decay. Updating these as I have discussed above should help to get your traffic moving in the right direction.

 

Work with us at ePresence to Kill Your Zombies

Here at ePresence, we know even more about SEO than we do about zombies! We can identify areas of weakness and traffic loss on your website and work with you to fix these. Our experienced team will be happy to discuss your business and create a unique plan to work together, killing off those zombie pages, increasing traffic and putting your business ahead of the competition. Call us today to find out more about our Cork SEO Services.

 

This article was first delivered as a presentation at SEO Vibes on Tour Dublin 2024.

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About Author

Declan Clancy

Declan Clancy

Declan Clancy is an enthusiastic, results oriented and creative Digital Marketer with over 10 years hands on experience across digital channels. In his last role as Group Digital Marketing Manager for Trigon Hotels, Declan was responsible for the ecommerce strategy and implementation for their 3 hotels. While at Trigon Hotels, Declan won Best use of Twitter for a Large Business at the Cork Digital Marketing Awards for his work for Cork International Hotel. Declan holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Marketing from the Digital Marketing Institute and a Bachelor of Commerce Degree from University College Cork.

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