How to Un-zombify Your Blog

Recently I made you aware of 5 signs a blog has turned into a zombie. I’m sure that some of you, after reviewing these signs, realized that your very own blog has been zombified. Don’t worry. You can UN-ZOMBIFY it!

If you have a zombie blog on your hands and you want to breathe new life into it, here are some steps to take.

Quarantine Your Zombie Blog

The first thing you need to do to start un-zombifying your blog is to quarantine it. This means locking your blog in a dev environment. You need to set up a clean area where you can start to transform it back into a healthy blog. The last thing you want to do is try to do any transformation in a live environment. You’ll never be able to ward off other zombie blogs while you’re trying to transform your own.

Pick Off the Zombie Leeches

Once you have quarantined your zombie blog, the next step is to pick off the zombie leeches. Go through your blog and delete all the spam comments. This may be a very long and manual process, but it’s necessary if you want a healthy blog. You also want to go through and see what external-pointing links can be removed. They can cause your healthy blog to bleed out and eventually turn back into a zombie. They best way to figure out how many or which zombie link scabs to pull off is to ask whether or not the links support or take away from the content. If you offer link placement within your blog as a way to make money, you may want to reconsider this strategy. Google tends to not like this type of activity and Google is the ultimate zombie slayer.

Drain the Blood

With your zombie blog quarantined and the leeches removed, now you can start draining all the unhealthy blood from it. You want to go through your blog and delete pages/posts that are either not your own content (duplicate content), complete gibberish (spun content) or of no value (content written for apparent reason). Be sure to redirect these pages to the most appropriate category page though. The blood may be bad but the veins are still important. So don’t leave any veins open (i.e. no 404s).

Perform a Brain Transplant

At this point, you have the beginnings of a healthy blog. However, you’re missing the main component…a healthy brain. Regardless of why and how your blog originally turned into a zombie, you need to find a new, healthy brain for it.  This means finding someone to write for the blog who’s going to help keep it a healthy blog. Typically this involves incorporating a few writers and even a dev resource. The goal is to change the way you were previously thinking about the blog and put a new brain in its head.

Undergo Bone Regeneration

Congratulations. At this point you should have a leech-free blog with a healthy brain and clean blood. There’s just one last thing you need to do to ensure your blog doesn’t become re-zombified. You need to perform bone regeneration. You need to take a close look at the platform your blog is on and ensure it can withstand attacks. This means updating it to the most recent software, not allowing all comments to automatically posted and making sure it can’t be hacked/attacked by other zombies.

If you have a zombie blog on your hands, follow this process and you’ll be able to rescue your blog from the depths of zombiness.