Does your website use a .eu domain ?

I bet you are, like most British people these days, fed up with hearing about Brexit but as the time for us to leave gets closer, I’m sure there will be many other items we haven’t thought about that come to light.

The latest I heard relating to websites is that the European Commission has announced that when we leave the EU, any UK business that is using a .eu domain name (e.g. www.example.eu ) will no longer be entitled to own or use it. You also will not be able to redirect the .eu domain name to a .co.uk or other domain you choose to migrate to.

There are apparently more than 300,000 .eu domains that have a UK registrant.

So what are the implications ? Changing your domain name to use another extension like .uk or .co.uk for example means you effectively have a brand new website so that any SEO history you may have accrued over the time your site has been live will be lost and you go back  to square one. If you have built a brand or reputation around a .eu domain name it could be a big issue for a business.

Since, at the time of writing (April 2018), we have around a year still before we leave the EU, it is probably a good time to make a start at limiting the damage if this affects you.