Press Release Newswires - a dangerous option?

[McTaggart]

Hi, I'm a PR and haven't used a newswire once over last 10 years. There are usually better alternatives which give you more control.

Anyway, now a client has asked me for distribution of investor information via a newswire and now I've started worrying about the SEO consequences.

I've spent a couple of days phoning around newswires and I think there's a real danger of picking up lots of backlinks from syndication sites (most of the distributors have sites they "partner" with to reproduce your original news release) so...

Lots of backlinks will suddenly appear from external duplicate content (I will not carry the news release on client's website (no newsrooom) and I will just use url as link).

I'm thinking there's the potential for a penalty (and even if not now, then in the future if Google decides to tighten rules further which looks likely).

One newswire has recognized this and now only syndicates on 2 websites. The others haven't including the business newswire I've been asked to use.

Your thoughts would be welcome... Thanks in advance!

[McTaggart]

Hi Cyrus - that's really helpful, and interesting - thanks so much. I think you're dead right RE: sticking to newsworthy releases! Look forward to your blog post on the subject Best wishes, Luke

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for asking this question. There's been a lot of misconceptions around press releases lately, in the wake of Matt Cutt's recent statements, and I've been meaning to write a blog post about it soon.

I happen to use press releases for link building, successfully, quite a bit. The trick is realizing that the links on the press release sites themselves don't really help you, and can actually hurt you if you over-optimize (or even optimize) the anchor text.

Press releases distributed across a vast network of duplicate, low quality pages have the potential to create a very Penguin-like problem.

Here's a portion of my presentation from MozCon which addressed this topic:

http://www.slideshare.net/cyrusshepard/high-roi-content-strategies-for-seo/48

My three rules for press releases are:

1. Don't link to yourself (or client) using important keywords
2. Linking using generic anchors or your domain name is fine, i.e. http://example.com
3. The goal is not links directly from the press releases themselves, but from 3rd party sources that pick up on the news and write their own content about you - the way a press release is traditionally supposed to work.

In my opinion, if you press release doesn't earn links from independent 3rd party sources (news sites, reporters), or earn you significant traffic, then you most likely didn't have anything newsworthy to announce in the first place, and likely wasted your money.

The whole thing rest on newsworthy content. As a PR professional, I'm probably preaching to the choir, and I'm sure you understand better than most, perhaps even better than me.

In the end, don't fear the press release. They serve a legitimate purpose. Just use them the way they were meant to be used - by earning links instead of buying them.

[james25]

The competitor is only doing press releases, guarateed - looking at the links pointing back to their site, the only ones going back to the pages that are ranking for this high value keyword are from spammy press release sites, many of which are specific to different states in the USA (The competitor is from the UK).

Doesn't look like anyone is sharing or linking to the content or the press releases.

[SanketPatel]

James, Is your competitor doing only press release ? As per the video, links from Press release doesn't affect SEO directly but when the content is published on several sites, it might get into the eye and he might share it out that helps in SEO. Matt Cutt has mentioned that in last part of Video.

[james25]

That's not what i've found though.

A pretty big competitor of mine started targetting a high value keyword several years ago and several months ago released a whole wave of these press release distributions - They had a slight improvement for a couple of weeks and then went from #40 to #4 in the space of a month.

They're now #2 and it looks like they'll take #1 within the next couple of weeks.

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[SanketPatel]

Hi Guys,

Do you know this ???

Matt Cutts of Google said in a Google Webmaster Helpforums that links from press releases shouldn't have a positive impact on your rankings.

More information: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-press-release-links-16136.html

[William.Lau]

Just to give you an idea of what kind of partnership they are referring to..

The sites they partner with generally just pull the text and occasionally maybe the link within the PR. What I've seen from a few PR I had with PRweb, there are no links to your site other than PRweb and any outlet that decides to publish your content.

No actual site or 'partner' would want to aggregate that many PR...AND give link juice. That is just not cool SEO.

So there is little danger of PR damaging your SEO.

Whether or not PR is still a good source of SEO is another topic for another day.

Hope that helps

[activitysuper]

You could find a PR wire which doesn't produce a backlink, far as I know they use to sell the service through the SEO benefit, saying you can even have a link or 2 in the body content, well just don't include them or at the end of the article include a text link which isn't actually a active link.

Just a thought.