Did the Brexit Party hijack Sadiq Khan’s website?

Something strange has happened to Sadiq Khan’s site, if you visit his site today, it redirects to TheBrexitParty.org.

See for yourself: http://sadiqkhan.org.uk

This was what Sadiq Khan’s site looked like, until about halfway through 2018, when it seems the domain expired.



Allowing anyone to register it and take control.



Someone at the Brexit Party has presumably dishonestly registered the domain and redirected it to TheBrexitParty.org.

This was done, almost certainly, in order to benefit from all the high profile, valuable, SEO benefitting links from the BBC, Wikipedia and others.

As any digital marketer or business person has known, for 20 years now, high profile links from trusted websites result in more traffic from Google and others.

The ownership (whois) records show that the domain’s expiry data is in June/July.

According to WayBack Machine (internet archive), Khan’s content disappeared in the summer of 2018. So it looks like that’s when the Brexit Party apparently hijacked it.

When journalists and others wrote articles about Sadiq Khan over the years, they linked to his website, so now that the Brexit Party own the domain, they redirect all of those valuable links, to themselves. It’s quite shady and deceptive.

Examples of organisations that have old articles with links meaning to go to SadiqKhan.org.uk, but instead redirect to the TheBrexitParty.org, without realising it, are:



The BBC:



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31794599 (bottom of the article)



The Guardian, multiple times:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/sep/17/religion.islam (First para)

Opendemocracy:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/shine-a-light/what-is-g4s-doing-in-englands-nhs/ (Second to last paragraph)

Wikipedia (On Khan’s own page):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadiq_Khan (In the footer)

Forbes Magazine:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogeraitken/2016/03/09/would-a-brexit-spell-disaster-for-londons-tech-innovators/#2606865752e9

Business Insider:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadiq-khan-britains-obama-2016-5?IR=T

And 1,000s of other smaller sites, that now unwittingly link to the Brexit Party’s homepage.

Can someone tell Sadiq?

Perhaps he can re-claim his domain via Nominet and stop it from sending SEO juice and helping to promote the Brexit Party in Google!

Also, they’ve clearly been at work hunting for other peoples’ sites to hijack, they’ve done the same thing to Labour’s Michael Cashman MEP!



http://michaelcashmanmep.org.uk -> hijacked, redirects to TheBrexitParty.



I’m sure there are many more, I’ll be sure to find out.

Mr BrexitBalls