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I've investigated a huge list of newswires. I really like the look of a couple of heavily business oriented wires - very regulated and unspammy, so for business stories I will be using those. I found one newswire which is very aware of the SEO implications of too much syndication to awful sites - they appear only to syndicate to a handful of reasonable quality sites. Others do much heavier syndication. I will stick with the 3 that appear to be safest for now...

This was interesting http://searchengineland.com/how-prweb-helps-distribute-crap-into-google-news-sites-140597 - I think there's a level of nervousness about what happens further down the line. Interesting times. Think I will hang fire for the time being, and explain the issues to my client.

Thanks for useful feedback guys - appreciated.

I've been a PR for over a decade and never once have I used a PR newswire. I find the personal and targeted approach far better. Research your target journalist. Write a bespoke news release. Speak to the journalist. That's the best way to achieve coverage in the most influential media outlets.

You don't need to use a PR Newswire of course. In my experience as a PR, only a minority of journos use them. Far better to target individual journos after researching your key targets. Do something bespoke for each journo.

Just been investigating PR newswires for the first time (despite having worked in PR for over a decade!)

One of my clients has asked my to send out a news release via a newswire of my choice. I will not be posting the news release on my client's website, to avoid the most obvious duplication issue.

Has anyone had SEO probs from newswires though? I just saw one which offered: "Minimum guaranteed number of media websites on which your release is posted" alarm bells!

Hi, I'm just putting pizza restaurant on various very relevant 'eating out' directories. Just noticed one directory then proceeds to place your listing on around 40 other sub-directories (each with own URL). They don't put <no follow="">tags on any of the 40 odd backlinking URLs.</no>

I currently have around 300 existing backlinks, to this pizza restaurant, from a diverse range of sites. Should I ask them to put a nofollow on these 40 odd new backlinking directory URLs?

Thanks Keri and CMC-SD - on my way to take a look at SEMrush

Thanks Fred. Yes, it would be very useful to see where all your rankings are - I guess I can do a trawl through Google Analytics to see the keyphrases people are actually clicking through from, but it sure would be nice to be able to click a button and get a full run-down, for strategic reasons as much as anything (am I ranking for keyphrases which may be worth focusing on? Just found such a keyphrase this morning - never focused any effort on it because I imagined it was too competitive to bother with!).

Hi, I'm working for a client that draws custom from 3 nearby cities - I was thinking of creating a new page for 2 of the cities, reachable from within the website and not simply doorway pages.

Each new page would include (1) General info (2) info relevant to the city in question, if relevant to client - perhaps well-known customers already coming from the city in question (3) transport from the city - directions.

Is it OK to do this, or could Google see it as manipulative seeing that business is not geographically located in all 3 cities (in actual fact the business is in just one location, within the official borders of one city, in another city for some administrative services and 40 miles away from the third).

Thanks in advance, Luke

Was wondering how easiest to find all of a website's existing SERPs?

Thanks Oleg and Matt for the really helpful feedback

Thanks Robert and Ryan for your great input on this, Luke