Press Releases as SEO Strategy

[Vigilante]

Over the years, I have done many press releases. Some for clients, some for my own businesses.

The last one I did a few weeks back was for a client with a revolutionary new medical device. The press release had some pretty impressive metrics of reads, prints, and how many other media sources picked up the news and ran with it. We also carpet bombed major news sources like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others... hoping someone either locally or nationally would pick up the "news" and do a story on it.

In my experience, this rarely does much.

So, now my thinking, especially as it pertains to using some free press release distribution sites, is the value might be in SEO and additional hits for indexed terms from the press release. If the release lives forever, and brings people searching for those terms to your release... and that leads them to your site, maybe there is long term residual value in online press releases specifically to generate additional positive hits in search engine results.

I know every once in a while when I am searching Google for something, I come across some of our archived news releases.

@LightHouse I am specifically interested in your opinion on this.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[nzerinto]

The value of press releases has diminished massively in the last couple of years. Google went through and shook things up so companies like PRweb had to update their policies to change all links to "nofollow" (or risk getting penalized by the big G), and enforce organisations only link using brand/URL anchors rather than keywords.

So although there may be a very slight residual benefit of a few visits every once in a while, thanks to someone finding such releases, it's not really worth the time - unless the news item is quite outstanding, and you can get airtime on the larger news outlets. However, in most of these cases, you would want to approach the news outlet(s) directly anyway, in order to increase your odds of your news being picked up in the first place.

 

[jason91]

Over the years, I have done many press releases. Some for clients, some for my own businesses.

The last one I did a few weeks back was for a client with a revolutionary new medical device. The press release had some pretty impressive metrics of reads, prints, and how many other media sources picked up the news and ran with it. We also carpet bombed major news sources like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others... hoping someone either locally or nationally would pick up the "news" and do a story on it.

In my experience, this rarely does much.

So, now my thinking, especially as it pertains to using some free press release distribution sites, is the value might be in SEO and additional hits for indexed terms from the press release. If the release lives forever, and brings people searching for those terms to your release... and that leads them to your site, maybe there is long term residual value in online press releases specifically to generate additional positive hits in search engine results.

I know every once in a while when I am searching Google for something, I come across some of our archived news releases.

@LightHouse I am specifically interested in your opinion on this.

Based on my understanding, the recent algorithm will lower your website rank if you have backlinks from low trust / spammy sites.

So the PR link is pretty much all about the source. CNN linking your site would obviously have a huge positive impact, asdadada news would probably make your website drop in a huge negative impact.

---- EDIT: Sorry I think I misunderstood the post.

PR might be useful - as long as its not linking to your site from a untrusted site