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RetailMeNot Says On Google Ranking Drop: The Reports “Greatly Overstate” Our Organic Search Impact

Barry Schwartz on May 22, 2014 at 2:14 pm

On Tuesday, Google pushed out their revised Panda Algorithm code-named Panda 4.0. Panda is designed to remove low-quality content from Google’s search results. Yesterday, we published an early Winners & Losers report on which large sites were impacted the most both in a positive and negative way.

RetailMeNot was one of the larger sites on the losers list, where Searchmetrics reported an approximate 33% loss in organic search visibility after Panda 4.0 was released. RetailMeNot was quick to issue a statement responding to these reports saying they “greatly overstate the impact on RetailMeNot.com.”

The company statement released this morning reads:

The company believes these reports greatly overstate the impact on RetailMeNot.com. Over RetailMeNot’s history, search engines have periodically implemented algorithm changes that have caused traffic to fluctuate. It is too early to judge any potential impact of the latest Google algorithm change. While RetailMeNot’s traffic with Google continues to grow year-over-year, the company has experienced some shift in rankings and traffic. The company continues to believe its focus on content quality and user experience will continue to help grow the business, enable consumers to save money and drive retailer sales.

As you can see, the company has said they “experienced some shift in rankings and traffic.” But they say it is too early to tell the overall impact on the company.

In addition, the company said they have “made considerable strides to diversify its traffic sources” detailing that “approximately 35% of RetailMeNot’s traffic came from sources other than search engine.”

RetailMeNot’s stock price has dropped today over 18%:

Finally, RetailMeNot said at this time, they will not have an update to its financial guidance.

You can read the full statement over here.

Searchmetrics has emailed us additional data, detailing the top 250 loser keywords for retailmenot.com after Panda 4 for google.com. Attached below is a screen shot of some of those ranking changes. I should note, Searchmetric data does not measure traffic, it measures search engine result pages and calculate how likely it is to get search traffic.

Postscript: Searchmetrics US data for charts have updated this morning. Here are two charts showing a drop of SEO visibility of 50% for RetailMeNot:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.