Canon.com Now Redirects to Global.Canon

One of the big questions regarding brands that use their branded new gTLD extension is what the company will choose for the left of the dot. It looks like Canon recently made the decision to use its .Canon extension, and company management decided on Global.Canon for the company home page. The company uses the Canon Global logo without any extension, so it does not look like rebranding was necessary.

Previously, the company used Canon.com, and if you visit Canon.com right now, you will be redirected to Global.Canon. Assuming the redirects were done correctly, I would imagine this redirect should help the company to maintain its search engine rankings.

Here’s what the company wrote about the url change and about the .Canon extension:

Until now, the URL we used for Canon’s global website was “www.canon.com.” From now on, however, we will begin gradually introducing “global.canon” to provide information to a global audience with a new online presence.

About “.canon”

“global.canon” is a URL that uses the new generic top-level domain (gTLD)* “.canon.” Since “.canon” is a domain name that can only be used by the Canon Group, users of “.canon” sites can be assured that the information they are receiving is reliable. In order to ensure that customers can safely access Canon information beyond the global site, the Company also plans to extend the “.canon” domain name to other Canon Group sites.

I checked a few Canon pages that were indexed in Google, and it looks like this redirect impacts pages on its main website but does not seem to impact all of the company’s subdomains. For example, the Canon News Room, which was previously found on http://www.canon.com/news/, now redirects to http://global.canon/en/news/index.html. On the other hand, Canon Solutions America can still be found on https://www.csa.canon.com/ without any redirect.

Because of the redirect, it is doubtful that people will have problems finding the new Canon home page. Those who know Canon.com or simply type that in to their browser will end up on the new home page. Those who use Google should be able to continue to easily find the website.

I am interested to know your thoughts on Canon’s url change.

Thanks to Kassey Lee for sharing.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. If its not broke, don’t fix it. global.canon is longer and only makes sense in english. .brands are really only a benefit if they could be reached just by typeing in ‘cannon’ into a browser. my prediction is that in a couple years they’ll be back to using canon.com.

  2. This is certainly a really big milestone. One of the first well-known brands to take the leap and move to their own .BRAND. Once one has done it, like Canon (Barclays already has a site up), I suspect that we’re going to see a lot more brands start their moves.

    If enough of the brands move, then they won’t be moving back to .COM.

    • That’s correct. Canon is not the first or only ones to move the main website to a .brand.
      – BNPParibas, the french bank, migrated smoothly their online banking site mabanque.bnpparibas in the second half of 2015.
      – Barclays migrated their main marketing site to home.barclays in 2015 as well
      – Sandvik, active in the petrol and oil industry, migrated their main website to home.sandvik in March 2016
      – Weir, also active in the oil and petrol industry, migrated all their various websites to global.weir
      – Pictet, the swiss bank, migrated their site to group.pictet
      and now Canon.

      In parallel, a large number of brands is experimenting their dot brand with campaigns, dedicated sites or platforms. Some of these campaings stopped, such as assismoneypenny.sony.

      We run a complete research programm about dot brand, their use cases, their ranking in search engines, the underlying technology and the traffic – it is the dotbrand observatory : https://observatory.domains

  3. Looks like someone else registered CanonGlobal.com which will surely recidve a ton of leaked traffic, lol they spend all that mo ey on the .brand without securing the com

  4. Steve, it doesn’t look like the registration of globalcanon dot com was due to Canon’s use of global.canon, it was registered several years ago: Creation Date: 2013-06-17

  5. This is very unusual in a country where consumer awareness in general and corporate awareness of domain name in particular is not high. It’s beyond my belief to see many companies in Japan spending a lot of money in ads to tell consumers what keywords to use in a search box. Unlike the recent wave of Chinese startups such as JD.com and LE.com which understand the benefits of having customers come directly to their corporate sites, many Japanese companies still focus on telling their customers to use third-party services to find them. If many Japanese don’t care about domain name, I don’t see why .canon will have any impact. I won’t be surprised to see Canon even reverting back to .com in the future.

    • Time will tell. My observation is that on the 560 dot brand contracts signed, only 74 have created real websites, from which a majority is small, one pages websites.
      The use case of most of brands today, is to develop mini-sites for campaigns and strong branding.
      The shift of the key brand asset is not the easiest choice for a brand – canon could have tested the new dot brand in a more silent way – e.g. with financial information like Axa did : annualreport.axa. This is a complex decision, that has huge impacts ( you can see our white papers in https://observatory.domains/case-studies/ ) – social media profiles, paper documentation, business cards, user guides.. All that will be impacted.

      The opening of “global.canon” must not be seen in isolation, it opens the way to many other possible domains – warranty.canon to register your warranty, guide.canon to download user guides, etc.. This is just one tree in a forest of potentials.

  6. Worth noting their public facing websites still uses the local TLD
    ie UK its Canon.co.uk Japan Canon.jp these are not being redirected.
    Even the USA public facing site https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home
    Isnt being redirected.
    Seems toe in the water job and they will lose traffic to GlobalCanon.com cant see them rolling this out globally but we shall wait and see.
    What a horrible home page URL Global.canon most will think its Home.Canon

  7. For me, the brand is more fitting to the left of the dot, not to the right.

    “Canon Camera”
    “Canon DSLR”
    “Canon Printer”

    They even have “Canon Global” for titles on everything, well, except Global.Canon

    Just seems backwards to me with most brands in general. Canon.camera makes sense, not so much when you reverse it. camera.canon or printer.canon

    The sub-directory works well with .com, “Canon.com/camera but doing camera.canon just look backwards and does fit a natural “search term” not so much with .canon for the most part as they are forced to put something before the dot like New.canon/camera

    Another big oversight is they did not set up the matching sub-domains when people type global.canon.com (adding .com to the gtld) for an example. That page doesn’t resolve currently and will likely get plenty of traffic from confused people.

    • Raises the question of language. In latin languages, the brand usually goes after. abbott created a social media campaign under lifetothefullest.abbott. The url lavidaalmaximo.abbott actually redirects to lifetothefullest with a /es/. On the other hand, bnpparibas has : histoire.bnpparibas which is a french site, and history.bnpparibas which is an english site..

      We run an extensive analysis of all the dot brand activity with out dot brand observatory.

  8. That is a good way to test what the customers and consumers want to use and remember.

    I agree that GlobalCanon,com will get some traffic. I suspect a UDRP is in the works. If they spent $ 1/2 mil?? what is $ 5k or $ 10k to get the .com domain.

  9. I don’t know what they are thinking. Canon.com is shorter and mobile friendly url.

    global.canon is too long, why not use Canon.com and sub domains like redirecting Canadian customers to ca.canon.com and Chinese customers to cn.canon.com? Makes more sense. That’s how you can use one domain for all your needs..

    • You don’t have to type to global.canon – just type canon.com and it redirects…

      Seriously though global.canon is shorter than a lot of URLs and most people once they have visited a site, only have to type a few letters.

      I suspect part of why they did this, lots of people have now visited the site just because they changed and it is a controversial change because domainers who own huge portfolios of .com sites often use a lack of big companies on non .com domains as a reason to buy a .com from them.

      It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

  10. They are trying something new, most likely it will be an epic failure, GTLD’s are not doing much lately, guys are just paying renewals, people are attempting to use them, for the amount of them out there, and the possible extension choices, they are an epic failure without a doubt.

    I know others will cry foul, but they have an invested interest, and want to squeeze that $2 out of every sucker who thinks some visionary will take them to the promised land.

  11. @Xavier For simplicity and the sake of consumers, I would avoid using sub-domain. Instead, I think the easier way to remember is to fix company name as the core and vary only the extension for specific purpose. That would be semantically correct. Example: Canon.com as corporate site, Canon.cn for China, Canon.news for general news, Canon.app to download apps, Canon.club for its membership club, etc.

  12. I think they will switch back to .com very soon, but only after losing a ton of valuable traffic. Stupid is as Stupid Does.

  13. Since “.canon” is a domain name that can only be used by the Canon Group, users of “.canon” sites can be assured that the information they are receiving is reliable.

    That is a dumb arguument as it’s also true with Canon.com : “canon.com” is a domain name that can only be used by the Canon Group, users of “canon.com” site and subdomains can be assured that the information they are receiving is reliable.

    No need to spend $185,000 + $50,000 per year when the same can be achieved from a $10 per year domain name.

    • Good point! How difficult will it be for these brands that will have to start managing their own registries now? Is it possibly something existing IT departments can just absorb?

      • I am sure they can easily outsource it or bring on the people to insource it. IMO, that likely isn’t too difficult for a multinational company of this size. I think the marketing aspect is the biggest x-factor.

  14. I would say 97% of domain investors who put money into GTLD’s are under water right now, plus as they wholesale out their better names for cheaper early on, they will be stuck paying premium, and higher than average renewal on their lower tier names, making the business model that much harder. Then you have to take into consideration all the new extensions still to come, then again if ICANN opens it up one more time which they will, as it will be another cash cow for them further dilution.

    $100K put into .com in 2014 would have yielded a profit if done right, $100K into the right keywords into GTLD’s with premium renewals on the better quality stuff, would see you in the red today.

    I understand people say I sold this many GTLD’s, but they do not account for the EAP costs, and the premium renewals they are paying on the names sitting in accounts with no sales, or parking revenue, you need to be honest with yourself.

    I really feel sorry for newbies, as there are so many hypsters trading on their past accomplishments achieved with .com, and are trying to get a leg up on this new pack of lemmings.

  15. Morons talking about how Global.Canon is longer lol SMFH. It’s not about that. They’re using their own brand as the TLD. That’s what it’s about.

  16. Even google is moving. why are you people so surprised ?

    It is a matter of time for BIG brands to move on. it is the best way to protect their brands and promote it.

    You know your .bank is only for real banks. no more bank scamming online. same story.

    Get along with it and do not be so sticky to your old .com , everything is changing around us and you people simply do not want to accept it.

  17. Guillaume Pahud dot stories,

    GREAT POINTS you made below, Thank you.

    1.The use case of most of brands today, is to develop mini-sites for campaigns and strong branding.
    2.Raises the question of language. In latin languages, the brand usually goes after

    3.The opening of “global.canon” must not be seen in isolation, it opens the way to many other possible domains – warranty.canon to register your warranty, guide.canon to download user guides, etc.. This is just one tree in a forest of potentials.

    A true global presence does require multiple trusted site activity to accommodate location, language and campaigns. One central site cannot accomplish this as effectively as multiples. One dot brand makes more sense to me than trying to promote tens or hundreds of dot others and having to monitor thousands of dot others you don’t want to own or need that want to take advantage of traffic. 50k a year is very reasonable for a global entity for customer assurance, maintenance, and long term cost factors like rich renewal fees.

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