Google NCR (No Country Redirection) Feature Stop Working But Google May Bring It Back

Google has a feature at www.google.com/ncr which is supposed to allow people to go to Google.com from outside the U.S. The NCR seems to stand for No Country Redirection. Many folks over the past few weeks began complaining that google.com/ncr no longer was doing just that.

We emailed Google as we saw the complaints to get a response, but Google did not respond to our inquiry as of yet. However, I did see Google’s John Mueller, who is tasked with webmaster communication, respond to the inquiry on Twitter saying “I suspect it’ll be back.” Meaning, John Mueller of Google thinks this is a weird bug and Google will fix the /ncr feature in the upcoming days or weeks.

The fear was that Google, like it did for the search location filter would continue to make it hard for searchers to search as if they were in a different location. Google has been making it harder for non US searchers to search as if they were in the US for several months now.

Google did tell us the search filter mentioned above was only removed because of lack of use, not for other reasons. But now that the /ncr feature stopped working, many began wondering if this was more of a policy change than anything else.

When will Google fix the No Country Redirection or No Country Redirect feature? It is unknown, as we have still not heard back from the official PR channels.

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