Can Press Releases Be Beneficial for SEO?

[sbrault74]

Can it hurt your website if there are thousands of links to your website from multiple websites with identical content?

Is there a right way to use PR for SEO?

[Social_Kyle]

If the press release is picked up by another site yes. And if you have 3 links back to your website it will count triple. But don't do any more than 3, it will count as spamming.

Companies have whole business models built on this.

[TrinShin]

I'm curious about sbrault74's follow up question. What is the right approach to doing press releases?

[Chris.Menke]

Having thousands of links from a handful of sites that are exactly the same can hurt you.

Yes, press releases can help with SEO--to a small degree. Don't build your back link strategy around them,  though.

[maestrosonrisas]

I also had done press release, avoiding lots of links and focus on publishing on a good web. But i notice that the press release and the entire article has been copied after on another web.

Is that dangerous for a site

[RepLoc_Tim]

Press Releases are meant to get picked up by lots of media outlets.  That's the point.  For example, if you submit to PR Web, your press release will end up on hundreds of sites.  I know from experience that it does not hurt you as I do daily for my clients and my own sites/ companies.  It helps as long as they are optimized well and have high quality content that people will want to read.  Google et al will select the "best" one(s) to keep in th SERPs and the rest will drift away.  Even though those pages with the press release still exist, they have no impact positively or negatively for you, and you won't get a duplicate content penalty as the search engines knows how to treat News. 
I agree with Chris that you must understand where they fit into your overall strategy.  They are only one small piece of the process.  If you build a strategy relying on press releases, you are going to be losing that treadmill battle.