Press Releases?

[aasbury]

Hi there,

I have about a dozen pre-paid press releases from PRWeb which I got about 9 months ago and so far I've only written and published two releases.

I had wanted it to be a part of my SEO strategy and now they expire in 3 months and I'm really having mixed feelings about using them anyway. My concern is that if I do use up all 10 of them or even a handful of them over the next 3 months it will be frowned upon by Google and co. for spamming news outlets. From what I'm reading these days Press Releases are getting very little to no SEO benefits. Is that your feelings? I may be okay with that since there may actually be non-SEO benefits from it but I don't want it to work against me either.

We just launched a new company and have lots I could write about but I don't know if using the press releases will have a negative effect and perhaps I'm better off just posting our press releases on our blog and taking the loss.

Thanks for your help!

Andy

[SparkplugDigital]

I don't think Google would view that as spamming at all. I believe that Google ignores links in most press releases that are posted to sites like PRweb. However a lot of news sites pay attention to these sites and may pick up your pr and republish the press release on their site including any links you included. These links would be counted by Google. Also a site could write about your company and link to you based on information in the pr.

[SuperlativB]

Good point, and also the reason for why you should use PR sites and networks instead of your blog since you then might get a buzz and some artices written.

I would recommend http://www.mynewsdesk.com, this is the next big thing. Check it out.

[ASOS]

I would go ahead and do them, if your competitors are doing, then definitely do it, if they aren't it is a slightly different link profile to them.

We use PR a lot for link generation and it works well. Just don't go mad and put too many links into the press releases and maybe in the future look for a range of PR sites (that are trusted) to seed things on. But they definitely work so don't fret.

A

[JaspalX]

Andy, issuing ten releases over three months is absolutely fine. Some of our clients issue many more releases - it tends to vary by industry but two or three per month is not (at all) uncommon.

Our research shows that unless you use a premium wire (say prweb's advanced service or prnewswire etc.) your news won't get picked up elsewhere (or if it does, it will have been scraped onto poor quality sites).

The links you get from the releases are really from the press release distribution service and (if you had a good story and used a premium wire), from the few news sites/blogs that cover the story and link to you. The link on the wire service is okay, but gets buried quite quickly.