Prune Zombie Pages

This is one of the few SEO techniques that seems to ALWAYS work.

I’ll explain…

Every site has web pages that provide zero value.

(aka “Zombie Pages”)

To be clear:

A handful of Zombie Pages is no big deal.

But when you have hundreds of Zombie Pages?

It can drag down your entire site’s SEO.

For example:

Joe Robinson is a Backlinko reader that runs the digital marketing agency, Kazu.

And Joe noticed that one of his clients had 76 thin, low-quality articles on their site:

So he consolidated some of these articles into in-depth guides…

…and deleted or forwarded the rest.

What happened next?

His client’s organic traffic increased by 16.23% in 30 days:

And traffic continued to climb as Google removed Zombie Pages from their index.

Joe isn’t alone.

A small business owner named Alan Boyd emailed me a cool little Zombie Page case study.

Alan’s client is a tour company out of Palm Beach Florida.

And he quickly noticed that this site had 50 service pages that all said pretty much the same thing:

So he combined the content from those 50 pages into 4 category pages:

And that single tactic increased their search traffic by 36.9%:

How about another example?

Bart runs the web design SaaS company, Readz.

Back in the day, Bart would publish content just for the sake of publishing content.

And this bloated his site with low-quality posts, like this one:

Then, earlier this year, he deleted 45 low-quality blog posts.

At first, his traffic dipped.

But as the algorithm kicked in, his organic traffic rapidly shot up by 32%:

Pretty cool.