Is it good/bad to place a press release on a third party website as well as your own?
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I have read that if a Company issues a press release via a third part service (e.g. PR Web) it is best not to place the release on the company’s own website due to negative SEO effects. Is this the case? I‘d really appreciate others thoughts on this.
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Would using rel=author be a good idea in this situation?
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I agree with Philip.
If you place a press release on your site and also place it on a popular press release site there is a very good chance that the press release site will outrank your site in the SERPs. Your site could also be filtered from the search results (google does not like duplicate content.)
Also, part of the Panda update was about sites that display dupe content. If your site has a lot of dupe content it could be demoted in the SERPs across the entire domain. In these situations duplicate content can harm you big time.
Also, the best way to inform Google that you are publishing duplicate content is to place a link in the press release to a duplicate copy on your own domain. Google has been exterminating linked duplicates for a long time.
Finally, the best way to get your rankings lowered is to give content to other powerful websites that competes in the same SERPs as your own site. Its not a good idea to feed your competitors and create new competitors.
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If the press release is likely to earn links (eg bloggers treat it as the primary source) then clearly it makes sense to host it on your own site. But - and it's a big but - your site may not be crawled by the engines sufficiently quickly for the demands of today's news media. Once a story is out, it must be findable. Therefore using a PR site that gets crawled regularly makes sense. A smart workaround is to publish the release on your site and on a PR site with a link on the PR site page to the corresponding page on your site. that should ensure your page gets crawled more quickly and the engines should treat your page as the primary source. Of course all this assumes that you have some real news to announce.
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Good answer from Philip, thumbs up!
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As in my opinion full press releases should not be placed on the own website. First: it won't help due to duplicate content. Secondly the press website is usualy stronger. They rank higher. The traffic comes from the press release.
If you like to use part of this content, you could write an abstract with a link to the original press release for those who'd like to read the entire article. There you have best of both worlds.
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I don't think it would harm you to post the press release on your site. There is a common misconception that you get penalized by Google if you have the same content as other sites, but this is not the case. Large news sites like the Seattle Times republish or syndicate articles all the time. Search engines simply try to omit duplicate content from search results so that you don't get 10 links that all go to the same article.
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NO.
Duplicate content will not help you rank much, but it will not harm you either. Search engines will decide who to give credit for original content, the second page will not get credit but will not be harmed either.
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