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Thank you, Those are both very good sites although not necessarily directly related to Press Releases (but I guess those are dead, anyway).

I remember in a Rand presentation or article there was a blog site that was relatively the same as HARO with people posting their blog posts to be used as cited quotes in other blog posts, and the site pulled them up as you wrote your blog post for relevancy, any chance you remember the name of that site?

As familiar as I am with Yahoo SiteExplorer I have never used it to find external links that go to pages that are no longer there.  How can I do this with that tool?

I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember.

One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately.  I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?

Many of my clients release newsletters and other peices of content qualify as press releases.  I have been wondering if people find that the press release sites such as PRleap or PRweb are useful and worthwhile?  If so, which do you feel is the best?

Is there any research on this?  I am planning to record my results from these sites and perhaps make a Youmoz post in the future.

Casey's answer pretty much nails it, here are a few specific tricks I use to make the process faster though:

Using the moztoolbar do a SERP overlay on the sites for the search term to easily get a feel for the difficulty of competition based on domainrank.

Do a whitespark report to see how many citations the other sites have compared to your site.

Do getlisted.org search on their sites/your sites to get a basic idea of how involved the other sites on the local search are.

Run on page optimization reports for the terms, local and not, to see if you can gain a relevancy advatnage.