Previously, we pointed out that RetailMeNot, the online coupon codes site, gets a lot of traffic from Google. As part of Priceonomics Data Services, we crawled through search engine results to discover that 71% of the time they ranked first in Google for online coupon searches. They then convert this traffic to affiliate fees very successful en route to an IPO in 2013.
However, in May of this year, Google updated their ranking algorithm in an update dubbed “Panda 4.1.” It was a very bad day for RetailMeNot as has the company lost almost half search traffic overnight. This also resulted in the company’s share price being decimated.
Since then, we’ve continued to track RetailMeNot’s SEO performance for hedge funds and other investors. While an update to the Google algorithm is sometimes a death blow to a company, in the the case of RetailMenot, it looks like it wasn’t.
Over the last six month’s RetailMeNot has slowly clawed its way back in the Priceonomics Coupon SEO Index. It also seemed to benefit greatly from Google’s October algorithm update, a change that also increased traffic to the Priceonomics Blog.
Source: Priceonomics data crawling
So, is RetailMeNot back? It’s not quite reached its pre-Panda-devastation levels, but it’s gradually emerged from Google doghouse. If anyone in our audience has an idea about how the company did this, we are all ears.
As always, data behind these charts can be purchased through Priceonomics Data Services, which issues a weekly update on RetailMeNot’s SEO traffic to financial investors (employees at Priceonomics occasionally use this data for trades as well so consider this a disclosure). Developers can also use our API to run crawls on any SEO terms they want to track.
This post was written by Rohin Dhar. Follow him on Twitter or Google Plus. To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, sign up for our email list.