Guess who runs Cantonfair.com? It is Global Sources. The domain name was registered in 1997, four years before the Canton Fair official domain – Cantonfair.org.cn. The domain history tells us it was registered by a company called Promoexport Advertising Consultants Sdn Bhd and hosted under two Global Sources domain servers since 2001.
The website is up recently, filled with pretty much the content about Guangzhou, a.k.a. Canton. The site is very Global Source-alike and no surprise that you will find the information of the China Sourcing Fair. In the exhibitors section, all the listed companies are linked back to their pages hosted in Globalsources.com.
Why would Global Sources want to run Cantonfair.com? Well, one obvious reason that I can imagine is for the SEO advantage. The site is now ranked number two for the keyword “Canton Fair” on Google. The rank is achieved pretty fast. There must be many backlinks contributed by Globalsources.com and its hundreds of subdomains, which give Cantonfair.com a very powerful leverage. Also, a very interesting finding is that even on Wikipedia, a couple of articles about trade show, trade fair, trade convention, are all referring Cantonfair.com as the website for the China Import and Export Fair. This will contribute a lot to the search engine ranking.
Domain name is like real estate. If you own it, you own it. But owning a competitor’s domain name and to operate the site that targets technically the same audiences, this practice is arguable and can be harmful. I won’t recommend it.
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Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
