Press Release distribution, your thoughts?

[MeEatBrains]

Hey guys, you know that PR distributions services that syndicate your text to few legit PR sites and a bunch of other low authoritative sites some of which are even using dofollow links. I have used such services numerous times for anchor diversification and for building unstructured NAP citations for some local sites, but from some time I really thought up whether these links from sites with not so clean backlink profile do more harm than good.

Of course, it subjective which provider do we use, but you get the idea.

Do you use such distribution services, what are your thoughts in general? Thanks.

 

[chanilla]

It seems like most of these are shit these days. There are two services I wish someone would offer in the Buso marketplace... A PR service, where we can take a prominent company in our niche, and generate some buzz around recent happenings.

And second, bring back a manual forum commenting service. There used to be a guy on Wickedfire that was really good at creating threads, marinating profiles, and getting reply links to stick for a reasonable fee.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Of all of the things you can do for your site like this, such as getting all of the local citations, getting all of the social media profiles, etc... the one thing I never did was a press release blast.

At this point, they're nearly completely spam. The last time I got one, some giant PBN scraped one of the sites to syndicate content and I ended up getting a ton of links I didn't want. Not to mention most of the press release sites themselves aren't any good. Most are deleting old posts these days, even the more reputable sites, due to their trouble getting anything new indexed, which is fine since I suppose that's not the point of a press release anyways. But we're talking SEO here.

If I was to do this, I'd make sure the anchor was branded, generic, or a raw URL, or I'd even consider just a raw URL with no linking at all. If I did link, I'd make sure that it was syndicated with nofollow.

At this point, I wouldn't touch a press release for links with a 10 foot pole. Though I think it'd make a nice test to see how URL embeds with no link effect rankings, like if you chose some inner post with zero links that was stable and shot a release out for that.

 

[The Engineer]

John Mueller said in his recent video hangout that Google now ignores most links found within press releases. This is because 99.9% of press releases are sent out by the company themselves for the sake of obtaining links. They aren't natural. He says Google "tries" to ignore them.

This is followed by statements in the past where Google says press release links should be nofollowed and are considered a link scheme depending on how you write them. The ultimate point of the discussion is that these links won't help or hurt you. They're a waste of time for SEO.

Here's the transcript of what he said on June 29, 2018:

So we try to ignore links from things like press releases because we know in general companies put the press releases out themselves. So any links in there are essentially placed by themselves.​

​

But if these links happen and they're out there it's not something you need to worry about because you can't really take them all back. ​

​

I just wouldn't rely on kind of press releases as a strategy for building up links for a website because like I said we do ignore most of those.​

 

[DKurtz.me]

Of all of the things you can do for your site like this, such as getting all of the local citations, getting all of the social media profiles, etc... the one thing I never did was a press release blast.

At this point, they're nearly completely spam. The last time I got one, some giant PBN scraped one of the sites to syndicate content and I ended up getting a ton of links I didn't want. Not to mention most of the press release sites themselves aren't any good. Most are deleting old posts these days, even the more reputable sites, due to their trouble getting anything new indexed, which is fine since I suppose that's not the point of a press release anyways. But we're talking SEO here.

If I was to do this, I'd make sure the anchor was branded, generic, or a raw URL, or I'd even consider just a raw URL with no linking at all. If I did link, I'd make sure that it was syndicated with nofollow.

At this point, I wouldn't touch a press release for links with a 10 foot pole. Though I think it'd make a nice test to see how URL embeds with no link effect rankings, like if you chose some inner post with zero links that was stable and shot a release out for that.

To your point, a lot of the press release sites have absolutely turned to shit. The PR game is much different than it used to be, but can still be relevant if used properly for a local business. You can SEO a PR if you wanted to, but I've found the value to be in the embeddable options for those PRs.

For example, inserting a YouTube promotional video that your company made that's close to the keyword/target/whatever that you want to show up for. Making a custom Google My Map of your business' location, complete with EXIF optimized images, videos from your company YouTube playlist, social links, and fully filled out markup for each and then iframed into the PR is an easy way to get a ton of links to your GMB that are hyper-authoritative. In addition to that, you can insert a naked, unstructured copy of your business' NAP in the PR as well.

Now, take all of those, and realize how many embeds that is, not to mention G crawling the PRs now that you've put those three pieces of information into the PR to get blasted out. Yes, you still run the risk of a PBN scraping the info, but for the most part, they've gotten pretty good at filtering those sites out, or at least having them downplayed in terms of harm vs. help.

I know if I do put links into my PR, I'll do about 5, 2 generic, 1 naked, 1 homepage and 1 inner page that I want to actually push for. If you're in the market for hyper-local stuff or local lead gen, PRs are a goldmine. They can work for larger sites as well, but if you can play the "localized" angle a little bit, you'll get more bang for your buck.

John Mueller said in his recent video hangout that Google now ignores most links found within press releases. This is because 99.9% of press releases are sent out by the company themselves for the sake of obtaining links. They aren't natural. He says Google "tries" to ignore them.

This is followed by statements in the past where Google says press release links should be nofollowed and are considered a link scheme depending on how you write them. The ultimate point of the discussion is that these links won't help or hurt you. They're a waste of time for SEO.

Here's the transcript of what he said on June 29, 2018:

So we try to ignore links from things like press releases because we know in general companies put the press releases out themselves. So any links in there are essentially placed by themselves.​

​

But if these links happen and they're out there it's not something you need to worry about because you can't really take them all back. ​

​

I just wouldn't rely on kind of press releases as a strategy for building up links for a website because like I said we do ignore most of those.​

I absolutely agree on Mueller's points, however a no-follow link is still a link, despite the brevity or relevancy. You definitely don't "build links" with a PR, but if you have viable news, a video, a company address, and a G Map ready to go, you're golden, because now you're playing their game with their tools. It may seem like kowtowing to G, but believe it or not, it'll help you in the short and long run.

I've had PR's get rolled into a roundup report on [Redacted] before as a brand link in a "Top 20" or a "best of", and they absolutely make a world of difference once you hit that level. Not to mention if you can get it featured in Google News, which G is obviously not going to ignore at any point in the near future. Even better still, is once that PR is shared on a site like [Redacted] you can write a PR about that PR, saying that a major site like [Redacted] picked up your story and has been seen as an authority/expert/whatever on [Niche], allowing you to start the whole process all over again.

There's a method to the madness, once you realize that you can control the madness and force G to do things it wouldn't normally do by giving it pieces of what it wants. By putting SEO level embeds into a PR, you've now forced G to crawl and pay attention to it, because it has G property embeds in it, and we know how well mama bear looks after the cubs...