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I’m glad you raised this Spencer. I have been using press release sites (PRweb) for the last eight years and have had a limited success with some of our releases and others were not so hot.

A few years back we had a client who was chosen to appear with her business in a reality TV show. We produced a press release with information about the client and her business and why she was picked for this show. The release was quite lengthy and had a lot of content that was not known about her – it did quite well and was featured on several hundred websites with some nice backlinks to her site.

Another release about why remodelled bathrooms increase house properties performed even better and created some nice linkage for another client.

A release for a client who is in the luxury and designer clothing industry did not do so well – and in my opinion was a great press release. Why it didn’t do so well I have no idea – it was a real head scratcher – it could have been timing – London Fashion Week had been over for a month and was old news.  It could have been other factors in the wrong type of circulation – basically not the right audience.

I think a Press Release can work quite well and perform if the subject matter is a trending topic / Buzzword, or has a current popularity level.

Hi James,

We have used PRWeb for the last 10 years to release some quite compelling press releases that have worked quite well for our client’s in announcing new services or updates to existing services.

Your question are they valuable then yes initially and a well written press release supported by a good SEO and social media campaign can prove beneficial. As for a long-term linking campaign I don’t feel it is beneficial – the press releases are picked up as static content and placed mainly as is on a variety of websites that for the most part are not indexed by Google.

There is a very good article by Tim Grice about the very subject:  Are you wasting your time with online press releases?

Thanks

Vincent

Hi Joanne,

We did the same thing recently for a client who wanted to move from a .com to a .co.uk. She had a well-established website.  Our methodology:

1. Create exactly the same URL structure and architecture.
2. Copy the exact same content over to each URL
3. Notify all websites linking to any pages to update (We actually did this part well in advance).
4. Notified Google via its webmaster tools that we are migrating to a new website. You can use their new site section to notify them.
5. 301 redirected every page of the old site to its new equivalent page.

The sit back and wait, we found the changeover within the SERPS fairly fast – there were a few hiccups while waiting for Google to fully update, however it worked and all PageRank now on site and older positions are almost all regained.

Hope that helps.

Recently we were faced with the same issue on behalf of a client. I made the decision to retain the www. My reasoning was based that this client had been live with their website since 1998 and had amassed literally thousands of backlinks all pointing to the www of his website.  In my mind keeping his URL structure was more important than shortening a URL. His backlinks spoke volumes for his past success.

I am also of the opinion that a majority of end users will still type into a search www as prefix before the domain name. With that in mind it makes feel that they would also automatically type ‘www’ as a prefix when linking back to a site.

So, strictly from an SEO point of view I woudl use WWW.

Hi Rob,

If the links back have nofollow in them I do not believe they will add any backlink benefit to you. The benefit you receive is what the affiliate links purpose was intended for – to drive sales.

Here is an interesting article that wills hed some light on your question. http://tentblogger.com/affiliate-links/

Hope that helps.