Google Says: Nothing Has Changed in International SEO with ccTLD Redirects

Google recently announced that it’s going to start redirecting its country-specific domains (like google.fr, google.in, etc.) to google.com. Right after this, a lot of people in the SEO community started thinking that something major has changed in international SEO. But actually, nothing has changed.

John Mueller from Google confirmed this again on LinkedIn and Bluesky. His exact words:“Nothing has changed with regards to international SEO.”

Someone asked him if everyone should now redirect their country-specific domains (ccTLDs) to a .com domain, just like Google is doing. And John's answer was simple: No, don’t do that.

He said:

“I wouldn't recommend using Google's domains as a model that everyone else should copy for SEO. Big companies do things their own way, and it’s not always about SEO.”

He also added that hreflang (the tag that tells Google which version of a page to show in which language/country) is still the same. There’s no change there either.

What This Means for You

If you’re using country-specific domains or hreflang tags to show the right content to the right users, you can keep doing that. Just because Google is redirecting their own domains doesn’t mean you should too.

This is more about how Google runs its own setup, not a new SEO rule for everyone else.