Change of URL + SEO Impact

[ederdesign]

We recently changed the URLs from our site

http://www.website.com (old)
https://website.com/us/en/ (new)

Our ranking is plummeting every since and I wonder if the new URL had something to do with it.

Do you know if that change, could have impacted the ranking?

[Iannaude]

Yip that is exactly why your rankings are plummeting. Its important to always do an SEO migration if your URL structure is going to be changing.

I would recommend that you have a 301 redirect added from the old URL to the new one. If your website has been ranking well and attracting organic traffic for a long time, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed. Then I would suggest having a look at your top organic landing pages for at least the past year and ensuring that you setup 301 redirects from the old to new pages. Thats if your old pages are still indexed in Google.

If you had Google Search console linked then you also need to create a new profile as I see you now have https setup.

Anyway I hope some of this info helps and you manage to salvage some organic value and rankings.

[ederdesign]

Sorry, I didn't give the whole information. We're actually using redirects from .com to .com/us/en/.

However, when I look at the URL authority I get different figures. The url .com/ has a much bigger authority, even though it redirects to the .com/us/en/. That's why I'm thinking it's having a bad impact on SEO.

Thanks for sharing your opinion on that.

[ViviCa1]

Are you also 301 redirecting from http://www. to https://?

[ederdesign]

I think I might have found the problem.

We're actually, using a 302 redirect from .com to .com/us/en/. From my understanding that doesn't transfer the ranking, right?

We use a 302 redirect, because we have multiple stores:

https://website.com/us/en/ > United States
https://website.com/xl/en/ > Global Store
https://website.com.au > Australia

If an user visits www.website.com from Australia we send him to https://website.com.au.

I'm thinking we should use a redirect 301 to the /us/en/ and keep the 302 for all the other ones.

Does it make sense?