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PRWeb Links No Good

According to Matt Cutts, links in PRWeb press releases (I’m assuming this goes for all press release and maybe article release sites) won’t help a site rank better in Google.

Speaking about the Newsweek article on Rand Fishkin, Cutts said “And I doubt Rand was expecting any direct PageRank impact from Avatar’s prweb.com press release.”

That was the only hint that was given in the actual post(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-article-in-newsweek/), but the topic is further discussed in the comments of the post.

3 Quotes from Matt Cutts:
“a legit press release can get you written up by reporters, or editors/sites may subsequently choose to link to your site. But the actual content of the press release itself doesn’t directly affect a site. For example, on http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/10/prweb296086.php those hyperlinks don’t help avatarfinancial.com (in Google).”

“I’m not against doing press releases; press releases can be a useful part of getting traffic and building a brand. For ranking in Google, however, the main benefit of a press release is not direct links or PageRank from the press release directly; it’s primarily the people who decide to write an article and link because of that.”

“if someone is just syndicating articles from ezine or articlecity or wherever, that’s not adding a lot of value in my book”

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One Response to “PRWeb Links No Good”

  1. pvsys Says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 7:35 pm

    I think that Matt’s rhetoric is a often little beyond Google’s implementation… but not that far behind. To some extent, his stark warnings are meant to scare and I think he purposely exagerates in hope of instilling fear in SEOs.

    Google clearly hates **aggressive** SEO to a large extent because it makes their job of providing non-spam results harder. But they ARE getting VERY good at spotting blackhat and grayhat SEO.. still, I think Matt’s talking a little more tough than their actual algorithms perform.

    Nevertheless, they are always getting better and better at this game and it is a good idea to carefully consider Matt’s warnings because even if I’m right and they are not quite “there”, they’ll be there **soon**.

    Nevertheless, the REAL value of the Press releases was when other sites/journalists pick up those Press Releases and re-publish them on THEIR web sites. This was ALWAYS the end-game hope and even if the actual Press Release provider’s sites don’t contribute to pagerank, those times when an article does get “picked up” will still be beneficial, epecially if/when links are preserved. But this DOES take away the benefits that some might have previously enjoyed from a dozen previous Press releases which didn’t go anywhere.

    I guess the moral of the story is don’t waste time writing a dozen crummy press releases… instead write one or two really good and compelling ones and then get on the phone and/or e-mail and promote that press release directly in the hopes that someone will pick it up.

    –Rob McEwen



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