Google Country Redirection Change

[Bragg]

Analytics is showing a substantial decrease in referring traffic from Google specific regional domains like .ca, .co.uk, .de, etc vs an uptick from .com starting as of March 2018.

Did anyone note when this change happened when Google stopped directing traffic to their regional domains? Was there any press about it (couldn't find any). Using a VPN for different countries, I compared regional specific domain SERPs vs .com and they're pretty much identical.

Thanks!

[Bragg]

Looks like it was back in Oct 2017 when Google made the change for searches to correspond to user location instead of domain: https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-results-more-local-and-relevant/

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, that's the one I'm familiar with, and is the only big change I'm aware of in the past year. Haven't heard any chatter about location switching since then. There have been some changes that impact how Google handle locations for automated SERP collection, but most of those don't impact regular searches.

[Bragg]

Thanks Dr. Pete