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Hey, I'm Amber

There are zombies on your website 🧟‍♀️

Published 21 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown  ·  The undead edition

There are zombies shuffling around your website.

Hey Reader,

It's October, so let's talk about the undead. Specifically, the ones living on your website right now.

I call it zombie content. Old blog posts and forgotten pages that get no traffic, rank for nothing, and convert nobody. They're not dead, because Google still has them indexed. They're not alive, because they earn you nothing. They just shuffle along.

And they are not harmless:

 
What the undead cost you
→ Every dead page wastes crawl budget, the limited attention Google gives your site. More on that below.
→ They blur what Google thinks you're an expert in. A hundred stale off-topic posts dilute the signal your money pages send.
→ Sometimes they cannibalize the pages you actually want ranking. Longtime readers remember what that did to a certain AI-content site back in episode 12.

Here's the good news. Clearing them out is the easiest high-impact SEO project you can run, because you're not writing anything new. You're making what you already own pull its weight.

The zombie audit · five steps
01 Make a list of every page on your site.
02 Lay three numbers next to each one: clicks (Search Console), conversions (analytics), and backlinks.
03 Sort every page into four piles. They're right below this block.
04 Hunt your orphan pages, the ones nothing links to. Nobody finds them, including Google.
05 Measure your baseline, then give Google a few weeks to catch up. Pruning isn't instant, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
You're not writing anything new. You're making what you own pull its weight.
 
The four piles
01 Leave it. It earns clicks, conversions, or links. It works. Don't touch it.
02 Revive it. Good bones, stale content. Update, retitle, relink, republish. Often your fastest win, because the page already has history.
03 Merge it. Three thin posts on one topic become one strong page. Combine, then 301 the rest into it.
04 Bury it. No traffic, no conversions, no links, no hope. Delete and redirect so you keep the link equity. You learned 301s two issues ago; this is them earning their keep.

One rule above all: check backlinks before you delete anything. A page with real links pointing at it is never just buried, it's redirected.
  Prune with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.
 
 
⚙️ SEO term of the week
Crawl Budget
By the book

The amount of attention a search engine will spend crawling your site in a given period: how many pages it visits and how often, shaped by your site's size, health, and authority.

In plain English

Google's crawler shows up with a limited tank of gas. Every lap it wastes on a zombie page is a lap it doesn't spend on the pages that pay your bills, which means your new content gets found slower and your updated pages get re-read later. Small sites rarely feel this. Sites with hundreds of pages, half of them undead, feel it constantly and never know why.

Signs yours is being eaten
→ New posts take weeks to get indexed while your site keeps growing
→ A swelling “discovered, currently not indexed” pile in Search Console. Google found the doors; it stopped bothering to open them.
→ Hundreds of pages, a handful earning clicks, and the gap growing every quarter
🔑 The single most revealing question of all
“How many of our pages earned a single click from search in the last 90 days?”
Pull it from Search Console and compare it to your total page count. If more than half your site went clickless for a quarter, you're not running a website. You're hosting a graveyard with a contact form. The data doesn't lie, even in October.
 

Your wrench for the week

I put the whole thing into a one-page field guide: The Zombie Content Audit Checklist. Grab it and go clear out the ghosts.

🏁 Get the Zombie Content Audit Checklist →
🎧 Rather listen than read? The episode is live →
 
→ Want a read on your infestation?

Reply with two numbers: roughly how many pages your site has, and how many earned clicks in the last 90 days. I'll tell you whether you've got a few stragglers or a full horde, and which pile I'd start with. Straight read, no pitch.
  Every page on your site should pull its weight or pull out of the race.

Talk soon,

Amber
Active Media  |  SEO Sidekick  |  Ready For Traction

 

P.S. Your homework: open Search Console, pull pages with zero clicks in the last 90 days, and just count them. No deleting yet, scalpel rules apply. Knowing the size of the horde is step one.

Hey, I'm Amber

Let's take control of your growth strategy by learning simple SEO tips each week in my newsletter!

Hey I'm Amber, a seasoned SEO coach specializing in helping marketing professionals learn SEO with ease. With a keen focus on strategy and foundational SEO, I bring a technical approach to the table. My expertise lies in communicating the three foundations of SEO to help you better craft an SEO strategy that will drive impactful results.

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