Whether press releases help SEO or not has been an on-going debate, and we are here to tell you definitively that it does help SEO—without a single doubt. As skeptics speculate, business owners and marketers who understand how to leverage press releases to gain SEO advantages are forging new niches and dominating marketspace in existing industries, and they are making a killing doing so in sales and revenue.
We come across tons of articles that spread misinformation faster than the bubonic plague. Most of the blog writers that do not believe press releases help SEO fall into one of three categories:
- The copywriter who understands little about SEO—and couldn’t tell you the difference between Panda and Penguin, if his/her career depended on it. These are code names for Google algorithm changes. We do not hold it against anybody who does not know (although, we highly recommend that you get educated on both). But we do have an problem when these copywriters, posing as experts, are providing false and misleading information to business owners, hurting them in the process. Sadly, most of these copywriters simply regurgitate (mis)information and do not even know what they are repeating is false.
- The entrepreneur or business owner who dabbles with no real commitment. So you’ve spent a few hours here and there reading SEO articles, watched a few videos on keyword research, and are now you are ready to make millions online. We hope this is not your attitude going into it because you will be disappointed. As with anything else, SEO is a skill—and you are competing against people who have spent well over 10,000 hours perfecting their craft (Malcolm Gladwell reference, if you subscribe to that).
- The marketer doing SEO freelance work who know press releases work but would rather tell you otherwise. I mean, how much incentive would someone have to promote something that would shrink their own income?
Admist the barrage of misinformation on the Internet, we are going to address two common questions perputuated by the haters and nay sayers:
Won’t Google catch on sooner or later and penalize them?
No. If the press releases are legitimate announcements of news worthy content that people are interested in reading about (they would cast their interest by searching for keywords that they are interested in, which is why your press releases should have search engine optimization in mind), there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
I have read that Google punishes websites with duplicate content. Aren’t press releases considered duplicate content?
No. Press releases and news content for media syndication does not have the same guidelines as standard website content. Otherwise, every news website including FOX, CNN, Bloomberg, LA Times, NY Times, etc. will be flagged for duplicate content.
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Case Study
As the title of this article suggests, we’re going to not only provide evidence backing up our claim but we will show you exactly what we did:
Two weeks ago from the time of this article was written (2/15/2016), we wrote a press release comparing our service to two of our competitors headlined “PRWeb vs eReleases vs Press Release Jet: Results Revealed”. The press release was uploaded to our website, and we submitted the press release using our very own Premium PR Distribution Plan $129. Now, if you search for “prweb vs ereleases” in Google.com, our website’s shows up on the first page of Google. These competitors have been around for MUCH LONGER than us—so how did this happen?
Because we truly do provide the best press release distribution in terms of results and price—and we provide the highest ROI out of any PR distribution company on the market. And we are honest and transparent—we will not tell you to do anything that we are not already doing and seeing results.
We hope this article helps clarify and debunks some of the misinformation perputating on the Internet.
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We also welcome anyone who disagrees to challenge us on our position—a position backed by 15+ years of experience in SEO (this is before SEO was even a thing!) throughout our leadership and management along with compelling evidence after evidence after evidence illustrating that press releases indeed help SEO!
Editor’s Note: The original article was posted in February 2016.
Have questions about press release distribution, or any of our other services? Our team at PR Distribution™ is ready and happy to help through email, live chat, support tickets and phone! Contact us