In short
- Zombie pages are indexed pages that bring neither traffic nor sales, and that dilute the site's perceived quality.
- In e-commerce, the usual suspects are almost empty categories, facets with no demand, forgotten seasonal collections and discontinued products.
- A page without traffic is not necessarily to be deleted: it may target real demand with tags that are too weak.
- Three possible decisions: improve, merge (301 redirect), or remove from the index.
Over the years, an e-commerce catalog accumulates pages: categories created for a promotion, facets opened to indexation by default, collections from a past season, discontinued products. Many no longer receive any visits. French-language SEO calls them zombie pages, a term popularized by Olivier Duffez.
Why they are a problem
A single zombie page does no harm. Hundreds of them do, if:
- they consume crawling at the expense of useful pages, on large catalogs;
- they dilute the site's perceived quality, with weak or almost empty pages;
- they fuel cannibalization when they duplicate active categories.
The usual suspects in e-commerce
| Page type | Symptom |
|---|---|
| Almost empty category | 1 to 3 products, often after products were delisted |
| Facet with no demand | Filter combination indexed by default, no associated query |
| Seasonal collection | "Summer sale 2024", "Christmas 2023" still live |
| Category duplicate | Subcategory and facet with the same products |
| Discontinued product | Page with no stock and no replacement, kept by default |
| Empty brand page | Brand that is no longer distributed |
How to spot them
- Cross-reference the list of indexed pages (crawler, sitemap) with twelve months of Search Console data: impressions and clicks per page.
- Isolate pages with no clicks, then look at their impressions: a page with impressions but no clicks is not dead, it is poorly presented.
- Add the number of products and the revenue per page for categories.
Deciding page by page
| Situation | Decision |
|---|---|
| The page targets a searched-for query, but its tags or copy are weak | Improve: title tag, meta description, H1, copy, internal links |
| The page duplicates another page | Merge: 301 redirect to the retained page |
| Recurring seasonal collection | Reuse the URL every year, as Google recommends for recurring events |
| No demand, no use, no products | Remove from the index or delete, with a redirect if the page had links |
The first case is more common than you would think. A category titled "Covers" does not rank for anything; the same page titled "Waterproof garden furniture cover" can capture real demand. Before deleting, check that it is not a useful page that is poorly presented. See our method for optimizing a category page.
Improving in bulk rather than deleting
On a large catalog, the sorting often reveals dozens or hundreds of pages to improve. That is where unblind comes in: each page is analyzed from its actual content and its queries, then receives a title tag, a meta description, an H1 and copy that give it a chance to rank, with the quality checks described in our guide to category SEO text.
Frequently asked questions
What is a zombie page?
It is an indexed page that gets practically no visits from search engines and brings no value to the site: thin content, duplicate, outdated page. The term was popularized in French-language SEO by Olivier Duffez (WebRankInfo).
Should you delete zombie pages?
Not systematically. Start by checking whether the page targets a searched-for query: if so, improve it. If it duplicates another page, merge it with a 301 redirect. If it has no demand and no use, remove it from the index or delete it.