Are press releases that could end up being published with duplicate content links point back to you bad for your site ?
-
With all the changes to the seo landscape in the resent years im a little unsure as to how a press release work looks in the eyes of Google (and others).
For instance, you write up a 500 word press release and it gets featured on the following sites :
- Forbes
- Techcrunch
- BBC
- CNN
- NY Times
- etc ...
If each of these cover your story but only rewrite 50% of the article (not saying these sites wouldn't re write the entire artcile, but for this purpose lets presume only 50% is rewritten) could it be negative to your backlink profile, ? Im thinking not, as these sites will have high authority, but what if once your press release is published on these sites 10 other smaller sites re publish the stories with almost no re writing, either straight from the press release or straight from the article in the mainstream news sites.
(For clarification this Press release would be done in the fashion of a article suggestion to relevant journalists, rather than a blanket press release, via PR Newswire, mass mail out etc. Although i guess the effect with duplicate content backlinks is the same.)
You now have c. 50 articles online all with very similar content with links pointing back at you, would this have a negative effect or would each link just not carry as much value as it normally would.
By now we all understand publishing duplicate content on our own sites is a terrible idea, but dose have links pointing back to your self from duplicate (or similar) content hosted on other sites (some being highly authoritative) effect your site 's seo ?
-
As far as I know, you can always tell Google to ignore links when it's hurting you in Webmaster Tools, right?
-
Not harmful, I just have a theory that they don't count.
-
Thanks, what do you think of the trickle down effect regarding smaller publications who (who may still have decent DA say 30-40) who may just chose to copy and paste the press release, all the way down to the bottom rung publications that will just be rss aggregating content from other sites.
These are the sites im more worried about as there are more of these, between them all there may be 20 - 30 copies of the original press release hosted on different sites.
Can this still be harmful as they will have links back to you within duplicate content ?
-
Great question Sam-P. I am fighting with this in Czech Republic too.
In our segment (ERP systems for production companies) there is no real chance that big press-houses will publish our press releases. And in first place you want them to be published in segment relevant magazines that unfortunately have lower autority in Google's eyes. And even worse - very often they don't rewrite our PRs at all.
It's some sort of paradox for me - you write a good press release, and press loves it so it gets published. But in the end it could do more harm then good, I guess.
-
Sam -- if you get a link to or brand mention of your site on any or all of these powerhouse publishers, it will do far more for your SEO (not to mention your traffic) than any duplicate content penalty that could possibly ever be imposed. Think holistically about your content engine rather than focusing on specific penalties and you'll see why you can't go wrong getting mentioned on Forbes.
-
nope - you would be fine.
As these sites have very different audiences, why not spend the time writing individual articles to meet there readership (thus more likely to be used), for techcrunch, focus on the tech element, for CNN, the news part of it.
whats more likely is that most of the sites won't cover it especially BBC unless it is really news worthy.
Would be worth reading http://moz.com/blog/tips-from-a-recovering-journalist-how-to-write-effective-press-releases-that-help-seo
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
-
Building an Industry Resource List w Links to Competitors
Hi folks. I'm working on a B2B e-commerce site in a very commoditized space. It's very technical and longtail-- several thousand product pages and of those, over 1,000 landing pages per month, when visitors find products. Most items we sell are only bought once or twice per year. Many won't even be bought in a given year. So it's tough to invest a lot on a given page, but we chip away at it. We don't have many non-product pages. To date, we've grown with solid on-page SEO for products and good customer service. I'm adding a resource section to include helpful articles and definitions of technical terms. Also, since good sources of products can be so hard to find (we literally have customers like NASA googling for parts), I would like to build an industry guide of sorts. It would include manufacturers, master distributors, distributors and resellers (like our site). To be a good list, it only makes sense to include my competitors. It's likely very few people will actually ever see this page, but I figure more deep content with lots of highly relevant links is good for raising DA, especially because it could become a page others want to link to. I haven't found a comparable resource in the 4 years I've been working on this project. Any reason I should not do this? Any pitfalls I should be aware of? Thank you!
Content Development | | Mike_Sobol0 -
How to get readers to engage with content
Hi everyone! Over the last year and a half, we've ramped up our content generation and have now hit our stride with a steady stream of blogs and videos. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, we are seeing great results. The problem is that the qualitative feedback is always passive. When we see clients, partners, etc. in person, they tell us that they love the content, but no one ever leaves comments or uses the call to actions to submit their info. There are some social shares, but now that LinkedIn no longer has a counter, it's hard to tell how much. I'm looking for advice on strategies to get more active engagement with our content. The ideal outcome would be active conversations and lead generation. Thanks everyone!
Content Development | | Enertiv2 -
Is it a good idea to have campanion site?
I am just thinking to start a companion site, do you think its a good idea to have this sort of site. As i believe it may be the good source to get good referral traffic from this site.
Content Development | | Mustansar0 -
Video content sites
In addition to you tube are there any other video sites worth uploading content to? Such as Vimeo? Are these any good or is you tube the only place worth publishing
Content Development | | Hardley1110 -
I allow authority sites to republish my blog articles, which then outrank me
Hey everyone. This is my first question here, I apologize if it has been covered before. I have a health and nutrition blog [authority nutrition] that has been up since December 1st, 2012. I've managed to write quite a few viral articles which have given me a bunch of natural links and a domain authority of 49, which I think is pretty great for such a new site. Haven't done any link building and everything is 100% white hat. Getting good rankings and good traffic already, so I can't complain. My only (1st world) problem is that sometimes major authority sites (DA of 70-95) republish my content. I always say yes if they ask me first, but some of them just republish without even asking. My articles are always indexed on my blog before they get republished, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. These sites always clearly link to the original URL, but they often tend to outrank me for the keywords I was targeting in the articles. They tend to rank in the top 5, but my original article is nowhere to be found. I plan on continuing to allow these sites to republish as I get powerful links and good traffic from them, but it's a bit frustrating that I don't seem to get the credit as the original source. I've already set up Google Authorship, but it doesn't seem to help. Is there anything I can do to make sure Google recognizes my article as the original and chooses to rank my site instead of the authority site that simply republished my article?
Content Development | | kriistjanm1 -
Possible to recover from Thin/Duplicate content penalties?
Hi all, first post here so sorry if in wrong section. After a little advice, if I may, from more experienced SEOers than myself with regards to writing off domains or keeping them. To cut a long story short I do a lot of affiliate marketing, back in the day (until the past 6 months or so) you could just take a merchant's datafeed and with some SEO outrank them for individual products. However, since the Google Panda update this hasn't worked as well and now it's much hard to do - which is better for the end user. The issue I have is that I got lazy and tried to see if I could still get some datafeeds to rank with only duplicate content. The sites ranked very well at first but after a couple of weeks died massively. They went from 0 to 300 hits a day in a matter of 24 hours and back to 2 hits a day. The sites now not rank for anything which is obviously because they are duplicate content. The question I have is are these domains dead, can they be saved? Not talking about duplicate content but as a domain itself. I used about 10 domains to test things, they ranged from DA 35 to DA 45 - one of the tests being can a domain with reasonable DA rank for duplicate content. Seeing as the test didn't work I want to use the domains for proper sites with proper unique content, however so far although the new unique content is getting indexed it is suffering from the same ranking penalties the duplicate (and now deleted content) pages had. Is it worth trying to use these domains, will Google finally remove the penalty when they notice that the bad content is no longer on the site or are the domains very much dead? Many thanks
Content Development | | ccgale0 -
Site with mostly images
I am working on a site which will be a portfolio of many photographers - hence there will be a lot of images - each image will have an external link to the photographers site, there will be a very small description and a lot of tags (for the site indexing to work) Bearing in mind that the site will consist of 90% images, 9% tags and 1% text is there a chance the site will rank well for my keywords (which will be the tags)? There will also be social comments e.g. facebook or discus but I want to keep the amount of text to a minimum.
Content Development | | ribandhull0 -
If we use content copied from another site ( assuming we have not plagerized), does it hurt our Google Rankings?
We have permission from another company to copy their content and use it on our site. This happens when we are describing a manufacturer's product and we copy pages from their site and add these pages to our site in order to describe the product we are selling. Is this considered duplicate content? Can this practice hurt us?
Content Development | | huskers0