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enter image description hereI've noticed a recent trend in many of our web properties (which have regular .com domain) that show referral traffic going from localized Google sites (like google.co.in, google.co.uk, etc) to google.com.

While we're not able to say with 100% certainty - it looks like the increase in referral traffic from google.com directly correlates with the decrease in traffic we are seeing from the various international versions of Google.

We have not made any changes to our Google Search Console during this time period and our URLs are not setup to be geographically specific.

Has anyone else noticed this on their websites as well?

Does any one know why this shift happened?

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Google prefers to show search results where it feels they are more relevant and required. Cannot exactly say if this might be the reason but if you had more visitors from the ".com" domain rather than the other domains and their engagement rates were high, Google should have preferred to rank you more on the ".com" domain.

On the contrary, if you did not have any targeted pages for the other ".co.in" or ".co.uk" domains, it should a different case. Without enough information or an audit, nobody can tell.

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  • Thanks for the answer. The confusing part for me is that I thought the referral means the users came from that Google site. So wouldn’t that instead mean that less people are searching from google.co.uk? Or all of the users who used to go to google.co.uk have decided to begin searching from google.com?
    – Jack
    Commented Feb 8, 2019 at 14:51
  • I wouldn't be able to tell that. That can also be the case. But have you checked your analytics for the dwell time differences? You'll find your answer there.
    – idk
    Commented Feb 9, 2019 at 5:52

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