A month ago, Google said it would soon redirect its ccTLD, country specific domains, for Google Search to its Google.com domain. So Google.de, as an example, would be redirected to Google.com. Well, that process seems to have kicked off on Friday, May 16th for some users.
A month ago, Google wrote, "country-level domains are no longer necessary. So we’ll begin redirecting traffic from these ccTLDs to google.com to streamline people’s experience on Search."
Alexander Außermayr spotted this on Friday and wrote on LinkedIn, "OMG, Googles Domain-Migration hat begonnen." He shared this screenshot of Google.at being redirected to Google.com:
Also Google.de:
I personally am not able to replicate, but I am based in New York - but also, this is supposed to roll out gradually, so some may see it and some may not for some time.
Alexander did tell me he and his colleagues were being redirected for a period of time and then the redirect went away. So maybe it was being tested for a little while? Then it started working again several hours later.
Either way, some are now starting to be redirected from Google's country specific ccTLDs to the .com version.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
