Big bank transitioning to .brand top level domain names.
Barclays, the huge bank based in Britain (market cap $77 billion), has begun using the .barclays and .barclaycard top level domain names.
According to a story in FinExtra, Barclays group CIO Troels Oerting says the domain names will create “a simplified online user experience, making it crystal clear to our customers that they are engaging with a genuine Barclays site. This clarity, along with the advantages of controlling our own online environment, enables us to provide an even more secure service.”
Google has indexed five pages under .Barclays. The bank seems to be using “home” as the second level domain name, e.g. home.barclays. One conundrum for .brands is creating a second level domain name that users will remember to type in.
Home.barclays seems to be a carbon copy of Barclays.com.
.Barclaycard is much more populated, with 213 indexed pages in Google.
Again on .Barclaycard, pages at home.barclaycard seem to be carbon copies of the same page on barclaycard.com.
For example:
home.barclaycard/news/2012-18.html
is the same thing as
barclaycard.com/news/2012-18.html
This seems like an ill-advised transition strategy, as it creates two duplicate sites.
When I search Google for the title of that page, “Barclaycard launches the latest version of its ePDQ payment processing system”, it brings up the .com page.
Alejandro says
May as well use .ClosedForBusiness
Christopher Hofman Laursen says
This is major news in Dot Brand land when looking at the big picture. While AXA and Marriott have dipped their toe in the water, this is the first “all-in”.
This is well timed news for fTLD Registry and their launch of .bank this week. Barclays reasoned that it was especially due to providing a safe haven for their clients that they did this move. This is exactly what .bank also promises.
Andrew Allemann says
I think it might actually be bad news for .bank. Here’s a bank using its .brand instead of .bank.
Snoopy says
4 years on and and a search for “barclays bank” yields barclays.co.uk in no.1 position and home.barclays in position no.3 (with what now just seems to be corporate content rather than consumer facing).
Also on barclays.co.uk they link to yet another site under the “corporate” tab barclayscorporate.com.
So when are they going “all in” exactly?
A mess.