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Very nicely.

And by phone, where possible.

There is link-less citation value in having your business name, address and phone number on any indexed document in Google (in my opinion)

Since you mentioned that you are a local company, I believe there would be value in the release from an SEO standpoint assuming the release is high quality and provides value, describing an interesting product or service you market.

Pick up the phone. Often solves the problem fast.

Sending an email is easy and requires no "on the spot" thinking.

Speaking to someone by phone does.

Calling just a few of those potential link prospects will have you quickly examining your value proposition (in a good way) since you will likely flub your first few attempts if your offer has no value.

I believe there is a significant difference between a link farm and a directory. And although there are likely going to be differences in how everyone views the two, the basic differences to me are:

Link Farms:

-No editorial discretion in who is linked to
-No editorial discretion in how one is linked to
-Often generally require a return link or triangular link
-Free for all approach to posting a link
-Often no real review process in terms of quality
-Do not have clearly defined guidelines for the process
-Allow you to link in any way you want (link anchor)
-Do not have content and promotional guidelines for content
-Created specifically to manipulate SERPs via surgical text link manipulation

Quality Directories (I believe there are about 15 total of these on the Internet myself)

-Editorial discretion in who is linked to
-Editorial discretion in how one is linked to
-do not require any link to be listed
-Review process in terms of quality
-Have clearly defined guidelines for the process
-Link to you as a business
-Have content and promotional guidelines for content
-Created to provide value to searchers

I would stay away from link farms to be sure.

Ultimately, I would never make this decision based on PR. I would make the decision based on who could give me the most editorial based link that looked natural, on a page that looked natural, and on a website that does not appear to sell links. That would likely be the strongest link, and least likely to raise and particular red flags.

Page rank is one of hundreds of metrics. Developing a very natural looking, diverse backlink profile consisting of a healthy dose of editorial based links will also land you in desirable places.

The answer is really "it depends"

Ultimately it depends on a large number of things, a few of which are:

-The number of inbound links to the website and to pages of the website
-The authority of the website
-The value and presentation of snippets on the page.
the type of content being presented
-The source of the content snippets and number of times it is being used on other websites.

There seems to be various thresholds for duplicate content. Certainly the more authority websites utilize this "mashup" approach quite successfully, while others fail and are subsequently largely filtered off in the SERPs.

I agree with Alan, and would like to add that I believe that using the silo method can increase the proximity of closely connected clusters of keywords better. In other words, by nature, in a silo structure, tightly knit keywords support each other and pass theme and relevance value to each other by default when a strong supportive breadcrumb is in place. Often with a flat site architecture extra programming needs to be done to establish those relationships as they relate to internal pages.

Depending on the price and ROI, I would recommend he considers purchasing as long as the links are not associated to a particular character or business ownership where they would explicitly be removed once the domain is purchased.

He could then work to build authority links on top of what is already there and improve positioning.

Hello James.

We have done some controlled studies which do show a positive impact in rankings for particular pages within the website when based on a very controlled, or tight taxonomy. I believe this is because of the ability to develop internal links to pages that might not receive a large number of internal links in the website. Additionally, since these pages are in the breadcrumb but likely not linked from other places within the general template, first link attribution is a factor.

Also, it is important to understand the impact of breadcrumbs on conversions. There are numerous studies which show the positive impact of site stickiness and metrics like bounce rate, TOS and conversion rate from well defined and helpful breadcrumbs.

What's good for the user is generally good for the search engine.

Best,
Todd