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It's a technique of guerilla and internet marketers. It's not a link to your website but rather just another way to rank in SERP's for a keyword. I've never heard of it being negative.

Guess we have to set up a second CMS, content etc. OK... submit to them. If I ran a plumbing site and one brand tried to tell me how to run my biz I would do an analysis and determine where they fall into the market importance.   I might decide to.... A) quit selling their CrappyBrand Plumbing Supplies B) quit selling all other brands and focus on their CadillacBrand Plumbing Supplies C) continue as I am and see if they cancel me D) build a little outhouse to sell their crappy stuff E) keep my current site and put a lot of effort into a site that sells only their brand Consider doing an analysis before you spend any effort to kiss their feet.  My crystal ball says there are going to be hundreds of sites selling their CrappyBrand Plumbing Supplies and nobody is going to be making good money from them. The aim is not to manipulate the rankings, Your client might not be trying to manipulate rankings.   But the plumbing manufacturer is trying to flood the SERPs and manipluate vendors.  My decision making would not be.... "Yes Sir".... or even binary.

Andy, I think I would be somewhat concerned about this on two levels.  First, the duplicate content level--Google may see the content on the site search site as the original, and decide that much of your main site is unoriginal content, and thus hurt your rankings for your main site.  Second, this is going to generate a crapload of links to your site from one other site, and so you're running a risk of having a problem with Penguin like this. Having said all that, this should only be a problem if there are LINKS somewhere to the search results on the other site.  Google itself won't execute a search form. I'll recommend Google's CSE (custom search engine) as a replacement. It puts all the search results on your own site, it's pretty inexpensive, and simple to set up.  And very easy to configure to look like the rest of your website.  To see an example, try the search on my site http://www.visualitineraries.com.

Andy, The issue with keywords in anchor text is usually a matter of the overall link profile.  If you look at all the links pointing back to the site, do a large percent of them include money keywords?  If so, than you'll want to balance that out either by removing links or getting new links without keywords.  As to how much a "large percent" is, there's no clear figure.  Some would say 25% and others as low as 10%.  The best way to determine that for your site is to just keep reducing the percentage of keyword-rich links until you see the site moving back up in the search results. Depending on how many links this site has in total and how many of them are either spammy or keyword-rich (or both), you may just be able to ignore them and just concentrate on building good quality, natural links.  If the site doesn't have a lot of links right now, you may be able to achieve the right balance pretty quickly while also continuing to build the site's authority (instead of removing links and potentially loosing authority).

I'd also add, if it's providing (relevant) direct traffic then you might want to keep it too. It can be a good indicator of niche directories that benefit your business...

Hi Andy, I would not waste your time trying to get them removed. In our experience it doesn't hurt to have these releases syndicated. I think google knows there a distinct difference between press release syndication and article syndication which is much worse. Press releases are meant to be distributed so I think there is more tolerance by big G. I would just be sure to not be too aggressive with anchor text links in the release.