Where Should Your Company Press Releases Live

[Ecom-Team-Access]

Hi there,

Our company publishes press releases on the company blog and have found we were hit by an algorithm update. We have identified the press releases as being the culprit and would like to move all press releases to a company press page on the main site and title it "press room" or "press." We have a lot of media sites that visit our blog to grab the most recent releases, so they are important to the business.

My question is, how should we handle the page SEO wise? Should we do a "no index" or a "no follow" on all the links? I'm curious what advice the community has on how to handle a company's press page.

Thanks!!

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Kevin,

Just a quick question - have you found that you were hurt due to the press releases being grabbed by other sites and they contained links to your site that you had included in the release?

From my experience the best way to deal with press releases is to use them for what they are meant - to bring exposure from a wider audience and not to use them to gain links. I personally nofollow any links in press releases and they still work well. I also only include raw URLs either at the homepage of site or at the page of something specific that I am writing the press release around. This is all pretty obvious but I still see people messing up with press releases.

I think having a separate press center is also a good idea as you mentioned.

Hope this helps...

[Ecom-Team-Access]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for responding! We don't think it was a Penguin update penalty, but the Panda 4.0. So with that being said, it was do more to thin content and press release content. We weren't using press releases as a link building tactic, but we didn't make the links "no follow."

We like the idea of setting up a press page exclusively for the releases and totally separate from the blog. My concern is that the releases could hurt the main site. What do you think about doing a sub-domain with no follow links?

For example:

www.press.example.com

or do you think no follow links with www.example.com/press would be ok?

Thanks again!

[Matt-Williamson]

As the main aim of a press release is for the press to pick up and give your newsworthy content exposure to their wider audience I would consider having it on your site but you could sit it in a sub-directory that had a noindex, nofollow tag on it as essentially it is there for repeat press visitors. It isn't really there to be indexed and rank in terms of the content of each press release page so this should matter. This is how I previously ran one site successfully - a press center with noindex, nofollow on it and then if it had something important that required more detail there would be a separate in-depth piece written and added in the news/blog section.

A sub-domain as you suggested would also work in my opinion.

When I did this before I also made sure my press center had a lot of calls to action all pointing at an email subscription form so I could email any press contacts every time a press release goes live (you may already have this in place but I thought I would mention it).

I would still consider adding a no follow to any links in your releases - as you say it isn't a link building tactic.

[Ecom-Team-Access]

Great, thanks for the feedback!

[Matt-Williamson]

No problem - that's what this great community is all about