Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem Alan. I knew this question would seem like the typical, "Can I rank from PR links," question.

Honestly, that is why we have never used these sites. In theory, if these site were used correctly, I think they might be valuable, but the amount of spam and hopeless SEO's that post useless content for a face value link, seem to bombard any hope of usefully content every being found or trusted by editors and writers.

I just wanted to check and see if anyone has ever experienced the opposite and had a real story or blog post come from their press release being found on a PR site.

Hi Alan, thanks for your response. I am not concerned with the link from the press release website. I know it is not valuable  I'm just wondering if anyone has ever had a press release they published one these websites turn into an actual article or blog post on a relevant website. Currently we do not use these website. We individually reach out to new sources and blogs, but I know that there is no way we could target 100% of the relevant sources that could potential publish content. That is the only use I can see these PR websites serving for us, if they deliver on that. Also, just the fact that it is obvious tons of companies still use these websites to publish their press releases, I wanted to hear if anyone has ever experienced success with them.

Hi Micheal,

What exactly does this rebranding include? A new URL? New keywords? New content? New pages? New design? Time and cost is hard to judge without knowing that.

However, strictly from a 301 redirect perspective, it is normally best to use a 1 to 1 redirect. This means that every old page should 301 redirect to its corresponding page on the new website, instead of redirecting all to the homepage or a basic category landing page. This is time consuming and monotonous, but if there are tons of deep links on your current website, this will help you not losing any traffic, as well as transfer a maximum amount of link juice to your new site.

Takeshi, thanks for your answer. We do take a tailored approach for local news sources and industry specific blogs. That is where we have a huge success rate, but I was more looking to see you or anyone else has had success using websites like, prweb.com or prnewswire.com. By success, I mean relevant news sources creating an article/blog posts or contacting you for a story.

Also, thanks for the book recommendation. I will definitely check that one out.

What is the best press release website for getting a press release in front of writers and news sources? We have used a couple with OK success, but I would like to hear and learn from the experiences of others.

Thanks

*I am not concerned with the page rank of the press release site or any SEO benefit coming from the PR website itself.

Awesome story. Thanks for sharing a real world experience. It's so important to go with a description that companies and marketing departments will understand.

Thanks for all of the responses. All of the titles sound great and make a lot of sense.

We use "Online Marketing Consultant" basically because we started listening to how our clients introduce us on conference calls, emails, and in meetings. We found that, "This is ____. He/she is our Online Marketing Consultant," was the most frequently used introduction, so we have decided to go with that.

I am piggy backing off of Rand's latest Whiteboard Friday:  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-we-cant-just-be-seos-anymore-whiteboard-friday (It is an awesome post if you haven't checked it out yet.)

I just want to hear some feedback from other industry professionals.

• Have you started defining/communicating your business as more than just, I do SEO?
• If so, what are you calling yourselves now and why?
• How has that been working out for you?

Thanks for checking this out Francisco. Per your suggestion and after a little research, we actually went through today and removed our signature from all of the websites we manage. It is a tough pill to swallow since it seems like almost every design firm does this, but we want to do it right. And you are 100% correct, the footer link to the design firm's website is not best for SEO or the client, which is always our first priority.

Thank you again for your response.

For the first several months this website, WEBSITE, ranked well in Google for several local search terms like, "Columbia MO spinal decompression" and "Columbia, MO car accident therapy." Recently the website has completely disappeared from Google's SEPRs. It does not even exist when I copy and paste full paragraphs into Google's search bar. The website still ranks fine in Bing and Yahoo, but something happened that caused it to be removed from Google.

Beside for optimizing the meta data, adding headers, alt tags, and all of the typical on-page SEO stuff, we did create a guest post for a relevant, local blog. Here is the post: Guest Post. The post's content is 100% unique. I realize the post has way to many internal/external links, which we definitely did not recommend, but can anyone find a reason why this website was removed from Google's SERPs? And possibly how we should go about getting it back into Google's SERPs?

Thanks in advance for any help.

I would stick with folders for two main reasons:

• First, yourdomain.com is part of your online brand. If every state's URL is statename.yourdomain.com, I think this takes away from your brand because the first thing people see when they look at the URL bar or in search results is a state name and not your URL
• Next, I second everyone else, subfolders are much more organized, subfolders look better, and subdomains are an old SEO strategy (a little spammy, especially for a new domain)

Hey Charles,

First, I would get in touch with the website owner or whoever you submitted your guest post to and request that they add your link to the article. I would do this very respectfully, and treat it like it might have been a mistake. I wouldn't even mention that you want to the article taken down if they do not add it, since the ultimate goal is to get the link. Also, I would create the code for the link to make it easy on them.

If they decide not the add the back link (bummer), then it is your call if you want to make the effort to get the article taken down. The only reason I would take the time to get the article taken down is if you have another niche website that will publish the content and will add your link. Otherwise, I would just make note of that website and never guest post for them again.

I hope this works out for you. I know how much time it takes to write good guests posts, so I really hope you get the link out of it.

It will be very difficult for one person to serve all of your company's SEO needs.

However, if you are going to tackle this alone, I would try to leverage as many resources internally as possible. I would make sure you are allowed to stay in constant communication with all departments, especially marketing and website development. Also, I would make sure that they are aware that you need to be in the loop to what their departments are doing.

If you website is up to speed with most of the on-page criteria, I would focus my efforts on link building and content creation. The marketing department will have some great assets and resources that you can use to build great links. Also, if y'all work together, you may get them to understand how press and events are great link building tools, which will help your efforts.

I would also make sure that you are involved in all changes/update to the website to make sure all things are done with search engines in mind.

Hello Amar,

I took a look at the search results for "Kookaburra Pro 600 wheelie kit bag."

cricketbestbuy.com is the 3rd results that I think you are referring to in your question, and I assume your website is cricmax.com

Here are some reason their page  is ranking higher than yours.

First, cricketbestbuy.com's domain authority is 23 vs 20 (yours). Their page authority is 16 vs 1 (yours). Domain and page authority are based off of your website and page's backlink profile. Links are the most important factor when Google determines rankings. To increase this you need to get quality websites to link to your website and this specific page.

Second, your title tag is better for this search query, since you have the "600" model vs their "300" model, but it is not an exact match. If you remove "B/L/S" from the title tag, it would be an exact match, which will serve you better. I would follow this same rule for the h1 tag, especially if the "B/L/S" is not 100% necessary for identifying the product (you can always add that in the description).

If possible, I would look into changing your permalink structure. Something like "cricmax.com/products/kookaburra/kookaburra-pro-600-wheelie-kit-bag" would be better than "cricmax.com/p/6616/kookaburra-pro-600-wheelie-bls-kit-bag"

To sum it up, the main factor that is causing cricketbestbuy.com's page to rank higher than yours is its domain and page authority, which can be solved with a few great links.

Good Luck.

If they are high quality, they will eventually show up on opensiteexplorer.org.

One linkscape update might not be enough time, since the only way links are added to your profile is when they are naturally crawled. Opensiteexplorer.org is a great tool and my favorite back link profile tool, but like anything, it takes time to analyze the entire web. I would give it 1-2 more linkscape updates before I would worry,  but I would not guess there is any issue with your website.

I love this answer Russ. There are no schemes or magical strategies to explore, just work and creativity to get those type of links.

Hi Micheal,

What exactly does this rebranding include? A new URL? New keywords? New content? New pages? New design? Time and cost is hard to judge without knowing that.

However, strictly from a 301 redirect perspective, it is normally best to use a 1 to 1 redirect. This means that every old page should 301 redirect to its corresponding page on the new website, instead of redirecting all to the homepage or a basic category landing page. This is time consuming and monotonous, but if there are tons of deep links on your current website, this will help you not losing any traffic, as well as transfer a maximum amount of link juice to your new site.

Since the disavow tool basically tells Google to nofollow the links, I would recommend first focusing on the bad dofollow links in your back link profile.

Also, as a fist measure, I would not use the Google disavow tool. Instead, I would reach out to all of the websites containing bad dofollow links and request them to be removed. I would give each link at least three attempts before considering the disavow tool.

I suggest manual attempts before using the disavow tool because using the disavow tool is basically like telling on yourself. Your are turning your website into Google for having a spamming back link profile. I do realize that the disavow tool is a much better option then getting hit with a penalty,  but I am a fan of at least trying to take care of it yourself before turning a website over to the mercy of Google.

Was it their Link Acquisition Assistant: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php?

Hi Peter,

Sebastian makes a good point. Relevant and respected (no spammy) directories are good but only in moderation. However, your primiary link building strategy should not consist of directory submissions.

Regarding receiving credit for a backlink, the link must be organically recognized (crawled) by a search engine, which takes time. The better websites are crawled more fregently, so their backlinks are recognized faster. Also, here is the opensiteexplorer.org linkscape schedule, https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule, which shows you the dates their data will be updated.