Your Site Likely Has Ghost Coding, Somewhere
When you take a new marketing role, you inherit a website with tons of hidden incarnations. All of this ghost coding may not be up to legal code, but it’s still your responsibility. Clearing out your orphaned infrastructure is a major initiative at the center of a Venn diagram between “improving SEO” and “addressing legal exposure.”
It’s Your Job As a Marketer to Find Areas of Legal Exposure That Are Beyond the Parts of Your Site You Mainly Focus On
There are three very common paths of discovery that might help you find digital assets that are owned by you and are your responsibility to keep updated.
- Forgotten Sites: During the heyday of microsites, before Google’s EMD (Exact Match Domain) update, and in the days when Wayfair was actually 200+ sites, businesses ran differently. Consolidation wasn’t a good strategy yet, and when it emerged as a new grand plan, some microsites didn’t make the cut. Businesses often retain exposure through SEO-targeted sites, micro brands, and geo-specific variations of their websites.
- Holiday Microsite: 75% of SMBs rely on the holiday season, and what better way to create a great experience than to create custom landing pages and sections for the holiday season? Old variations from years past still retain a digital footprint and must be updated for cookie consent and other legal code./li>
- Unmigrated Sites: Every decade or so, there’s a massive migration to a new platform of choice. In ecommerce, it was once Magento and soon became Shopify. Crafty designers, brand managers, and marketers often decide to pare down a site during that migration. What happens to the pages that didn’t make it over? Were they properly sunset, or are they still floating in the digital ether, causing their own looming exposure for your brand?
