Digital Marketing Expert Buys MEP Website to Highlight Online Identity Risks

At a time when many businesses are finding themselves overwhelmed as they try to adapt to the ‘new normal’, a leading IT professional is speaking out to ensure that business owners don’t overlook one of the most important factors of all: domain renewal. Digital marketing expert Craig Campbell has witnessed just how easy it is to forget about domain maintenance during hectic periods, having purchased nigelfaragemep.co.uk – the Member of European Parliament website of Nigel Farage – when the politician’s team failed to renew the domain during the height of Brexit talks.

Campbell, a Glasgow-based SEO consultant, has now owned the domain for three years, and purchased it as a way to show his clients just how easy it is to leave their organisations vulnerable to risk by overlooking registration renewals. And now, as many businesses are busy focusing on adapting and diversifying during the COVID-19 lockdown, Campbell is on a mission to ensure that domain renewals remain a priority, especially due to the damages that could be experienced if a domain falls into the wrong hands.

“Businesses across every industry certainly have a lot on their minds right now, and unfortunately the area that’s most likely to get overlooked is basic administration, such as domain renewals,” says Campbell, founder of training and consultancy firm Craig Campbell SEO. “When a domain lapses, it’s open for anyone to purchase, and the most worrying thing is that the buyer could use the domain for absolutely anything, including financial gain, fraud, and identity theft, so it really is essential to prioritise IT admin during this time.”

Campbell maintains that his purchase of the MEP domain was not done out of spite, but merely as a way to raise awareness of the importance of staying on top of IT and digital marketing administration tasks. The unusual example is often included in talks delivered by Campbell at conference events across the country. While he could certainly have used the influence of Farage’s website to promote his own services, or to fraudulently collect donations from supporters, he instead chose to redirect the website to a European Commission biography of EU Chief Negotiator, Michel Barnier.

Farage now has a new website, but many esources still include reference to the nigelfaragemep.co.uk domain, which instead directs to ec.europa.eu/info/persons/director-head-service-michel-barnier_en. Epsom & Ewell Borough Council website is one such example, and the domain was listed as Farage’s official website on Wikipedia as recently as December 2020.

In an effort to demonstrate that incidents such as this are not merely a ‘one off’, Campbell has also purchased craigdavid.co.uk and thekillers.co.uk – former websites of singer-songwriter Craig David and The Killers rock band respectively – when registrations were allowed to expire as the websites were shifted from .co.uk to .music domains. “When my clients move domains, I always advise them to maintain their former registrations and use them to redirect to the new domain in an effort to minimise risk, and that’s exactly what should have happened in these instances yet didn’t,” says Campbell.

To find out more about Craig Campbell, visit www.craigcampbellseo.com