Paid Press Releases: Good for SEO or bad?
-
Press release services like prweb.com and emailwire.com seem to work, but are they a good idea?
-
There is amazing trust flow with press distribution and it is VERY possible to rank certain queries with Press alone (read low comp local), however, ignoring the branding and view/traffic potential is a mistake.
Do not believe the hype that they are ineffective as an inclusion to your ranking strategy.
-
Agreed...they should be used exclusively for press mentions, not for SEO. However, if your story gets picked up then that's all the better for your site. One of the examples of a "link scheme" in GWMT guidelines are: "Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites."
John Mueller comments on press releases for SEO in the video embedded on Search Engine Roundtable
-
If you are sending it "for SEO" it is probably a bad thing. If you are sending it because you have a legitimately Newsworthy story to share, I think it's a good thing.
-
Only if your release is newsworthy enough that you expect it to get picked up and rewritten.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
A dumb SEO question
Is it possible for a blog to rank only with fantastic content without any purchasing of backlinks... And how long does it take (on average) to get for example 500 active readers daily?
Link Building | | ImeuOkou0 -
We're looking at providing SEO for a website that has the majority of its incoming links from websites created solely to provide links. Few have bad spam rankings. How worried should I be about those links?
The majority of incoming links to a prospect's website are from website pages apparently created solely to provide links to the website. Few have high spam scores. The sites linking to the main site have versions of blogs with linked text. They seem to be providing positive SEO value now, but I'm concerned they might get noticed and hurt the main site in the future.
Link Building | | PKI_Niles1 -
Followed links bad?
I send press releases through 2 different press release agencies. I noticed in the past year or so that one of the agencies started tagging all of the links in my press release with rel=nofollow while the other did not. I couldn't figure out why, so I actually called the "nofollow" agency...they told me that they do this because it is actually BETTER for SEO and that google would penalize you for creating new press releases that do not contain "nofollow" tag.. and that this was done as a result of some recent change to google's algorithm....now I do not know who to believe. Has anyone else heard of this issue and maybe could this be specific to press releases?
Link Building | | TrueResults1 -
A lot of backlinks from outside of niche – bad?
We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg: our.domain/user1 our.domain/user2 … our.domain/user100000 There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages. Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords.. Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.
Link Building | | dsumter0 -
Link from a non existing page- is it bad?
If Google Webmaster tools is showing a link to my site and when checked, that page doesn't exist (404 error), does that mean anything? Is it bad?
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
How do I remove bad web directory listings?
I am starting SEO for an E commerce website. I guess like 1 year or two ago they had another SEO company working for them. After looking in Site explorer I realized that they have like 2000 links (almost all from website directories) that have the correct anchor text but are all in the wrong categories, and most from countries like china and india. Many of the Titles are even in Chinese. This company sells packaging supplies and they are in categories like real estate, animals, and so on. I am changing the domain name, so I guess any links to internal pages will be lost, however I have to forward the main domain to my new domain, so any links to the home page will still be there. Does anyone know how I can remove these links??
Link Building | | DTOSI0 -
Duplicate Free Press Release Submission
I know that free press release sites don't always do the best job at getting ones relates out there, but I had a thought. What if I were to submit the same release to say, ten free press release sites? Would that it at least give me ten backlinks from those sites alone? They'd be good backlinks since I'll be able to have the desired anchor text. Is that just another version of article spinning, or is it a good strategy for getting the release out there as much as possible? I'd value any of your opinions.
Link Building | | UnderRugSwept0