Press Releases Are No Good For Search Engine Results

One of the keys to great search engine ranking is link building. Link building, or the practice of getting external websites to link to one’s own website, has always been difficult.  Why should another website link to yours?

Google would like the links that point to one’s website to be earned. A blogger, reporter, or resource directory thinks your site has great content or is worth mentioning (good or bad), and creates a link to your site. Unfortunately, this process is slow and to a large degree out of the control of a website’s owner.

In the good old days, a website owner (or their webmaster) could exchange reciprocal links. “You link to me and I will link to you,” provided both companies with search engine benefits. That is until Google clamped down on the process of manipulating its search results.

As one would expect, Google has always taken a dim view of websites which “purchase” links from other websites. However, there seemed to be one exception to this practice: Press Releases.  Technically, the website owner is not buying links when they spend $100 - $500 to have a press release distributed to reporters and newswires. However, often included in the press release package is syndication. The press release gets published on multiple “news” websites with links back to the website of the company issuing the release.  Maybe the word published is too strong, as a visitor to the sites on which the press release is syndicated will be unlikely to find the press release. However, Google is able to see the press release (when their robots crawl the site) and that is what counts. Or is it?

Not All Links Are Created Equal - No-Follow Links Are Worthless

What is a no-follow link? To a website visitor, a no-follow and follow / do-follow link look and work exactly the same. However, when a “robot” from Google or another search engine “crawls” (examines) a website, they will ignore the no-follow link, acting as if it isn’t a link to another site. In other words, no-follow links don’t provide any search engine ranking benefits. No follow links are more common than you might think; almost all links in Wikipedia are no-follow.

Guess what? Over the last year, almost all the major press release companies exclusively use no-follow links inside their press releases, including PR Web. Even if you provide them with a press release with normal links, they will change those links to no-follow. Of course, this was not a change that they wanted to make, but was effectively forced on them by Google. Basically, google said that when they see the same content appear in multiple places, they may penalize websites receiving links from the content  (unless, the links are no- follow).

Bottom Line: Don’t issue press releases for link building. If your goal is to have your business rank in Google’s Local Search results, read this.