Are high quality press release syndication site links valuable?
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Suppose your press release got picked up by high authority sites like Yahoo, Morningstar, PaidContent.org, etc. But they republished the press release and kept the links. Do these links pass any value since the sites are just republishing the press release?
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I think the valuable from the release is 100% dependent on the quality of the news / material.
If the release is shared and one high end media company picks it up, it's possible that their copy of the content trumps all other publications including the original release itself.
When this happens, then the value can of course be significant link-wise.
However, its best to focus on releases as a tool in the toolbox with a specific marketing purpose as opposed to link building.
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I've had the same experience as James.
The conventional wisdom is "Anchor text links from press release sites don't count, and Matt Cutts said so."
This suffers from the defect of being doubly untrue.
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Such links do sometimes count
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Matt Cutts never, ever said: "Anchor text links from press release sites never count." It's pretty much an urban legend that ought to be featured in Snopes. Matt made two off-the cuff remarks years apart to the effect that he wouldn't expect certain types of links to count in certain situations. These have now been taken completely out-of-context and repeated ad nauseum to attribute to Matt a statement he never made.
It's mind boggling.
Whether a press release strategy is the wisest use and best use of marketing dollars is another question entirely. There are both SEO and branding considerations.
My take: it's another tool in the toolbox, and is right for some situations -- but not others.
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Matt Cutts has repeatedly said that Google does not give importance to links from press releases and does not use them for ranking purposes.
However, we have personally run many campaigns of PR where we were able to get ranking to our websites using anchor text links from the press releases. So, I would say the links are still valuable even if they are syndication.
But then these high PR sites are very good for branding and generating traffic to your website. So, don't worry too much about getting the link benefit as syndication will help your site no matter what.
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