What Are Zombie Pages?
Zombie pages are webpages that generate little to no human traffic from search engines. These pages often have low search rankings and, in many instances, may not even appear on search results pages.
Zombie pages usually contain outdated content that is no longer relevant to your site, that is, if they were ever relevant at all. However, they remain on your site and have not been deleted. Outdated pages, thin content pages, and non-mobile-friendly pages are examples of zombie pages.
Why Zombie Pages Are Bad for SEO
Zombie pages can prevent your content from ranking on search results pages. This could occur when Google exhausts your crawl budget crawling your zombie pages. When that happens, Google may not have enough crawl budget to crawl the pages you want on search results pages.
Zombie pages may also have technical issues that make them load slowly. This hurts the user experience of visitors who visit the page. It may also hurt your Core Web Vitals and, subsequently, your page experience and rankings.
Indexed zombie pages may also appear on search results pages. This is a concerning issue since the page likely contains outdated content that is not helpful to the visitor. This consequently hurts the user experience and increases the bounce rate for your site.
Types of Zombie Pages
Multiple types of pages that qualify to be considered as zombie pages. So, the specific method of resolving the zombie page depends on the kind of zombie page we are looking at. To be clear, not all zombie pages are bad, and some may be resolved.
Examples of zombie pages include:
- Outdated pages
- Unindexed pages
- Thin content pages
- Poorly-optimized pages
- Non-mobile friendly pages
- Orphan pages
We will now go through these types of zombie pages one by one.
1 Outdated Pages
These are webpages that are no longer relevant to your site or the subject matter being discussed. They may have ranked at some point, but their rankings have reduced so much that they have become invisible in search results.
If these pages were previously ranked on Google results pages, you could update the content so that it becomes helpful. Otherwise, you could delete the page and use 301 redirects to send the links to more relevant content.
2 Unindexed Pages
These are webpages search engines refuse to index. This usually happens if the page requires excessive server resources to be indexed. For this reason, search engines may ignore these sorts of pages, making them ineligible to appear in search results.
If you want these sorts of pages on search results pages, then you should review the technical SEO of the webpage so that it becomes indexable. Otherwise, you should remove it from your site.
3 Thin Content Pages
These are webpages with little to no helpful content. For example, doorway pages, duplicate pages, and pages with excessive ads. These pages may be indexed but will not rank in search results.
Certain thin content, like doorway pages, violates Google Search Essentials policies and may get Google to issue a manual action penalty against the content or site. Others, like duplicate pages, do not violate Google’s policies but may dilute your link equity and PageRank by spreading it across multiple pages.
The solution depends on the type of thin content page you are dealing with. You can resolve pages with excessive ads by reducing the amount of ads on the page. In the case of the doorway page, it is best to delete it completely.
In the case of duplicate pages, use canonical tags to specify the canonical URL among the duplicate pages. You should also use 301 redirects if you delete the zombie duplicate page.
4 Poorly-Optimized Pages
These are webpages that are not optimized for the keywords they are supposed to rank for. These pages may contain helpful content. However, they don’t rank because search engines do not understand the type of search query they could be displayed for.
You can resolve these pages by optimizing them for on-page SEO. So, format the content for readability, use the appropriate header tags, and include your keywords where necessary. You can refer to this guide on optimizing your content for on-page SEO.
5 Non-Mobile Friendly Pages
These are webpages that are unusable on mobile devices. They typically take a long time to load and may be unresponsive. In all, they will cause your visitors to have a negative user experience and hurt your page experience.
These sorts of pages usually have technical SEO. So, review the technical SEO on the page so that it becomes usable. Optionally, you may move the content to a new location and then redirect the URL using a 301 permanent redirect.
6 Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are pages that are not linked to other content. Search engine crawlers cannot find these pages either since the content is not linked to other content. Visitors cannot access them unless they enter the URL directly into their address bar.
These pages may also be missing from the sitemap. You can avoid orphan pages by using internal links. This ensures that you link to all of the content on your site. You should also ensure to include all your important pages in your sitemap.