Zombies may be the most overplayed and trite concept of the modern era in entertainment, but that won’t keep me from using the reference. When referring to web pages, zombies are those pages that your site doesn’t need. Zombie pages are the lifeless pieces of your site that just won’t die.
Why would a person have boring and lifeless content on their website? Often it is unintentional, but sometimes we just become content hoarders, unable to let bad content die. A strategic zombie hunt can eliminate your index bloat and get put your vibrant, living content back in the limelight where it belongs.
What are Zombie Pages?
There are many different types of web pages that can become useless, or devalued over time. Some may even start as fairly useless, or harmful, even. Here are some of the more common types of zombie pages that may be contributing to your SEO problems through index bloating.
Old Content
Many of the pages that are considered zombies are just old. They may have been written with an old strategy in mind, or just simply became outdated over the years. For instance, if you are wanting your website to rank for terms related to the newest internet software available, having 4,000 pages of content written about software from 1998 are probably not going to help you in your endeavors. Pruning that content out will help the newer content from being diluted with old, irrelevant content.
Mistakenly Published Content
A zombie hunt I recently went on was all about the oops factor. Our site was set to create a stock photo page for every photo that was saved as media on the site. As you can imagine, this thin content wasting our Google crawl budget was NOT a good thing. Thankfully, problems like this can often be rectified by a simple, global change to the site. The rest is just waiting for Google to take notice of your zombie slaughter.
Duplicate Content
Many zombie pages are duplicates of other pages on your site. If you have duplicate content on your site without attributing it with the rel=canonical tag in the head, it can impact your search results. If you have multiple occurrences of “appreciably similar” content pieces, as Google calls them, search engines have a hard time determining which version is most relevant for a given search query.
What is Index Bloat?
When you have a bunch of unnecessary pages being indexed on your site, Google and other retrieval systems have to spend more time processing your content than necessary. Think of your top content as needles and the zombie pages as hay in a haystack. If you want Google to find the needles, having less hay in your haystack REALLY helps.
Bloating your site with useless content can lead to a poor user experience, too. While that in itself is bad, Google will pick up on poor user metrics and consider that data when making ranking decisions.
Identifying Zombie Pages
So what do zombie pages look like? Are they drooling while slowly mumbling something about brains? Not exactly, but nearly as simple as that. Use your metrics to identify your low quality pages. Here are some metrics to consider:
- Total visits (Pageviews)
- Bounce Rate
- Average Time on Page
- Unique Pageviews
- Pages per session (Pages/Session)
- Exit rate
If a page has few visitors, but has great semantic SEO value with rich content, you may want to keep it. Also, consider the pages per session. If a page tends to keep visitors on the site, it may be worth keeping, too.
Kill Your Zombie Pages with the Double Tap Method
What is the best way to get rid of zombie pages? Why, the Double Tap method, of course. Just as the characters in Zombieland use the double tap method to ensure zombies stay dead, we can use a similar technique to get kill zombie pages and have engines de-index them once and for all.
Quarantine and Kill Your Zombie Pages
How do you handle the undead? Quarantine them! The same is true with undead, useless web pages. Once you identify said pages, you can do several things. Here are some of them:
Delete Old Content
Want to make sure that zombie stays down? Delete the page and any associated media files that aren’t needed. Google can’t index what isn’t there.
Cannibalize the Content
Is there some value left in that undead piece you wrote in the 90s? Don’t kill it, cannibalize it! Take one or more pieces of content and revamp or combine them to give them new life.
Mark as No-Index
Marking pages as “noindex” in your robots file can be an effective way to keep the content from search engine indices. There are plugins that make this a simple process for those less tech-savvy.
Double Tap the Zombies for Quick De-Indexing
How do you take a zombie down and keep them down? The Double Tap SEO method, of course. After you’ve deleted the content, or marked it as “no-index,” their SERP “ghosts” will remain in your search results until the search engine knows its gone.
To hasten your zombies final demise, you can double tap them using Google’s “Remove URL Tool.” This tells Google that your page needs to be removed from their index ASAP. If you have thousands of pages, this may be too much work, but if you do this, you’ll see those pages removed from your results much faster. Otherwise, it could take weeks for the Google bots to get to it.
Don’t Be Gun Shy When it Comes to Zombie Pages
The key to an effective website pruning is to use your head and not your heart. Look at the metrics and consider the value of each page objectively. If you can’t stand to delete something, just unpublish it until you find a purpose for it.
Index bloat can really bog your site down and keep it from realizing its true potential. Once your star content is allowed to shine, you’ll be glad you double tapped.