I have been doing press releases for SEO. It does help in terms of getting backlinks.
One doubt that I often have is that all press releases would be treated by search engines as duplicate content. Since press release by their very nature should be similar - having a press release as one of the part of your SEO strategy should not be beneficial. Is this correct.
If the online press releases are treated as duplicate content then all the news sites like CNN, ABC, NBC and BBC would be interpreted by search engines as having duplicate content since all of them publish press releases which are released by news agencies like Reuters. Therefore the websites should not have good PR and should not rank high on SERP. This is not the case.
Please help me understand how this works because I’m sure there is more to it.
Thanks in advance
I used PRweb services recently and Found that websites which work as under their network mostly bookmark my press release link and when someone click on it they are redirected to my press release hosted on PRWEB. Yes there are some websites which have published my full press release but this is indeed a good question that how these sites save themselves with duplicate content penalization
Duplicate content is the hot topic discussed by all search engine forum members. This topic comes up for discussion both in Articles and Press Releases.
Press Release is good, if we submit to one pr website. If we submit the same Press Release in many PR websites may be taken by Google as Duplicate Content and might index only one. The same is the case with Articles too.
The Press Releases by news sites like CNN, ABC, NBC and BBC would not be interpreted by search engines as having duplicate content since all are different entities and have different domain names.
Thanks
@bluedreamer and @Technomethod thanks for the input. I now have a fairly good idea about the role press releases play in the area of online marketing.
It is people like you who make the online forums worth it and you are certainly an inspiration to people like me to contribute to fellow professionals.
Three cheers to both of you.
Pali Madra
Yeah. I agree with that. Especially since press releases when posted by the sites don’t really offer anchor tagging. But it’s beneficial if you get links back from it. In that sense, it would be SEO but certainly more marketing related.
There can be some confusion with whether this is SEO though because google news will count a press release as news and will allow someone who is searching for google news content related to the press release to be populated at the top of the news search. But this is not lasting placement. Although… with Bing. They compute it differently. Press releases also help position niche websites better on there. But the volume of traffic is just such a huge difference that it may not make a difference.
Press releases are intended for people who read press release web sites and really fall under “marketing”, not search optimisation. As the content is the same, the chances are that search engines will likely end up listing just one or two sites that have it on display.