The Hidden Digital Footprint: A Horror Story for Your Organization
Oct 01 2025
As Halloween approaches, it’s not just haunted houses you need to worry about — it’s the ghosts in your digital estate.
In his article, Haunted by Orphaned Sites: The Ghosts in Your Digital Estate, recently published on CMSWire, Lawrence Shaw, a digital accessibility expert, examines how organizations quietly build up a hidden estate of forgotten campaign sites, old recruitment boards, event microsites, third-party portals and other “orphaned” pages left live long after their purpose has ended.
He warns:
“Over years this estate of orphaned sites, zombie content, forgotten pages and digital detritus can build up and expand.”
Ghost Sites That Haunt Your Business
These unmanaged sites create a sprawling, invisible footprint that many digital teams and senior leadership are unaware of, rising unexpectedly from the grave to cause security, compliance, brand and data-privacy nightmares. The article explores not only the scale of this hidden problem but also why it poses such a significant, ongoing threat to businesses of all kinds.
These “ghost” sites don’t just haunt your brand — they can open the door to lawsuits and regulatory penalties. From data breaches on long-forgotten event sites to inaccessible pages that break compliance rules, organizations risk waking a monster far scarier than a Halloween ghost: legal action.
Taking Back Control
Shaw also offers practical advice to help organizations take back control of their hidden digital estates, including the need to focus on the most serious threats first. That journey begins with mapping your present position. Only by seeing the full scale of your digital footprint can you begin to take meaningful action to bring the problem under control.
At AAAtraq, we now offer a Landscape Scorecard – free for AAAAtraq clients – giving you a clear picture of your current digital estate. Over the summer, we enhanced our auditing and automation, training AI on our unique dataset. We can now move beyond diagnostics to show where value is being undermined and where risk is being created.
Don’t let ghost sites haunt your brand. Request your free Landscape Scorecard today:
Read the full article here: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/haunted-by-orphaned-sites-the-ghosts-in-your-digital-estate/ (opens in a new window)
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Lawrence Shaw’s CMSWire article explores how forgotten websites and orphaned pages can come back to haunt organizations, creating compliance, security, and reputational risks.