Link Building with PRweb press releases
-
Im looking for tips or best practices when sending out PR for link building.
I send out at least 4 press releases per month using prweb’s advanced release which allows anchor text. For the past few months I’ve been rotating branded terms, exact match keywords and full URL’s as the links, but always linking to my home page or to one particular subpage. Most of the releases are to announce upcoming projects or to announce a recent website launch for a client, less often we’re highlighting a service or special we want to promote.
Im wondering if I should be linking to more sub pages to spread links around, and if I should be focusing more on branded terms vs. exact match anchors. Due to the cost involved I just want to be sure im getting the most out of it.
-
[Response removed by forum moderator.]
-
This is always the issue with "We need you to prepay because... blah blah blah." The real reason is, if we did it month to month, it would kill the model.
I think the problem will be that slowly it has no real value. How slowly,who knows, I have never been able to justify the cost for the PR services. I have gotten a lot of emails from them telling me they disagree with me though.
Best
-
For one client whose work is generating some interesting potential headlines (business technology for the financial sector), I'm starting to experiment with PressKing.com. It's a distribution wire that's roughly like DM'ing an unusually large, influential Google+ circle. It's too early to call it a success, but here's why I think it's important to use in tandem with any PR:
- Their database includes journalists and bloggers who've consented to receiving fresh news on an overwhelming list of topics. Client wants to publicize a new patent for mobile checking? Want to get your PR in front of 2000+ US-based columnists who've expressed interest in "ATMs", "Business Technology", or "Digital Imaging"? (It seems like a good idea, no?) You can do that with PressKing, and the contacts span from high-DA sites like NYTimes, Bloomberg, and WSJ to niche news sites and industry quarterlies.
- If you're already using OSE to identify where related sites receive links from, and you know your client's low-hanging fruit (i.e. sites that link to multiple competitors but not to your client's site), it could be an excellent idea to add contact email addresses from those sites to the distribution list. Would it be more effective to reach out directly to individual journalists with a personalized note? Probably – but if you don't have the time, I think there's a way to do this respectfully, and successfully.
The technical considerations of which keywords to use, what anchor text, to which pages, I think are old-world considerations that obscure the real issue. The real issue is how to get links to your latest and greatest content while it's still fresh, and "fresh" is powerful bait for many journalists seeking word counts to occupy an otherwise slow news day. I hope this helps!
-
Wait, PR Web is sending some really nice links your way.
-
I am no expert, in fact I probably should not be giving advice, but here are my 2 cents. With the recent Penguin updates it seems that we now need to blend exact match anchor text with branded keywords. Make sure you diversify your back links, try to keep it natural.
-
Great ideas, thank you! The reason I've been sending them as one-offs is to keep the flow steady and add these types of links each month, but I really like your ideas about promoting great content. Easier said than done of course...
-
It's working OK, but it's hard to justify the cost. My goal was not to get the attention of the press, although I have on rare occasions, it was to get the releases picked up by authority domains for some decent links. It's certainly a case of diminishing returns since it seems to be the same sites that pick up the releases each month. I prepaid for a year with PRweb so im trying to get the most out it.
-
Most of the releases are to announce upcoming projects or to announce a recent website launch for a client, less often we’re highlighting a service or special we want to promote.
These topics are ephemeral rather than evergreen.
Just saying what I would do.....
I would announce client sites in batches - one batch of several clients every couple of months.
I would make three or four great pieces of content that are best-on-the-web in your niche each month (posted on your own site) and send one press release to PRweb that announces all of them. People might say WOW... if anybody still reads PRWeb releases.
I think that this would focus your efforts on building great equity in your website and minimize your investment in topics of temporary interest and using PRWeb - which IMO is a low value service. Maybe share your release with a couple of bloggers in your niche.
-
Nick,
Wow, by paying extra you get to use anchor text! OK, sorry, had to do that...
To say I have an opinion on these is an understatement. First, it sounds as if you are using them as more of an actual release which is good. Most companies use them as web trash and news rehash with a company or firm name repeated: XYZ announces inside toilets used more often than outhouses in US!!
My question would be, how is it working for you? Are you getting links back and are they of value? If so, where do you need/want them and make sure you are watching for questionable ones, keeping anchor text varied, etc.
Rand did a nice piece on Link earning versus link building that I went back and reread that speaks to more "meritorious" (for lack of a better term) link gathering. I think over time we will see this type of link building diminish. As someone who understands PR, I can tell you that the "press" does not see this type of thing due to there being so much of it. So, to call it a press release is overstating it at best. These are link building tools for the web.
I think with Penguin and all the other animals, slowly these will lose value.
Good to see someone at least using it like a real press release about their company,
Best
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Link-building best SEO practice (one-off VS periodic blogging)
Hi all, Generally, what would be best when building a website's ranking through link building? Having the same links from the same bloggers or receiving new links from different bloggers every time? A lot of the SEO services offer 4-8 blog backlinks per month. Would it be best if these links came from different sources every time or most from the same sources each month? I know there's a lot of factors but I hope this question is clear. Happy holidays and thank you for your insightful feedback. Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Relevancy of link profile
Hi! I'm doing an audit of http://www.stevesims.com/ at the moment, who has had rankings for 'website designers' plummet recently. Looking at the site, there a few things to do with on-page and on-site optimisation, but nothing major. Instead, I think the link profile is the issue. There's a lot of site wide links from non-relevant sites, but I'm struggling to see anything else. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Optimising My Website Link Containers
Hi, I'm looking at my links containers and trying to optimise them. I would be greatful if anyone can give me some feedback on my plan for perfect optimaisation. My links are constructed as follows: I have a two states:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
1/. A Non Hover state which contains an Image and Text
2/. A Hover state which contains a bit more text - I do this as containing full text on the non hover state would not be good for users and would look ugly as well. Here's an example block of the HTML - as you can see from the URL, its quite a deep page level. From the URL and Alt / Titles the Page I am Linking to is about: "The Royal Hotel Accommodation New York Holidays". I Just a bit confused on how I should apply ALT and Title (Titles in particular) attributes given the nested DiV's etc - I can apply these to parent level, or apply all levels, or apply them to a mix. Also is there any obvious thinks you can think of I am missing that may help onsite SEO? Thanks in Advance CURRENT UNOPTIMISED CODE:
The Royal Hotel
New York Holidays Accommodation
The Royal Hotel
MY OPTIMISED CODE (Adding Title and Alt attributes):
The Royal Hotel
New York Holidays Accommodation
The Royal Hotel
0 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740