What is the best process for conducting a content audit to identify 'zombie' pages?

All answers to this question.

Start by exporting all your URLs from your CMS or a tool like Screaming Frog. Pull in performance data from Google Search Console and Analytics for the last 12 months. Categorize each page into four buckets: Keep (high performance), Update (good topic, low traffic), Merge (multiple pages on the same topic), or Delete (outdated or zero traffic). For "Zombie" pages with no traffic and no backlinks, a simple 410 or 301 redirect to a relevant newer page is often best. This "Content Pruning" helps concentrate your "crawl budget" on your most valuable pages, which usually leads to a boost in overall site rankings.

   Answered 2024-03-07 by Linda Garcia

The "Merge" category is often overlooked, but how do you handle the technical side of merging three thin blog posts into one "Mega-Guide"? Are you carefully managing your internal links and 301 redirects to ensure you don't lose any of the existing link equity those individual pages might have built up over the years?

   Answered 2024-03-09 by Richard Wilson

• Richard, we are very careful with that. We pick the URL with the best existing authority as the "Master" and redirect the others to it. We then manually update every internal link that used to point to the old pages. It’s a tedious process, but it’s the only way to ensure the new "Mega-Guide" starts with all the SEO power we’ve accumulated.

     Commented 2024-03-11 by Jessica Thompson

Don't forget to look at "User Intent." Sometimes a page has high traffic but a 90% bounce rate because the content doesn't actually answer the question the user searched for.

   Answered 2024-03-13 by Susan Clark

• Great point, Susan. We found several pages like that during our last audit. Re-writing the intros to address the user's intent immediately dropped our bounce rate by nearly half.

     Commented 2024-03-15 by Linda Garcia