When Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, announced that links in press releases have no value for SEO, it created a lot of discussion and debate in the SEM community. But, if you look at his comments in their entirety, you’ll notice that he also said press release sites do have value for press and marketing reasons as Cheryl Conner, contributing writer at Forbes , so eloquently points out. Consider, 92% of journalists use search engines to research stories and 81% of journalists use search engines daily ( MarketingSherpa ) Blog readership, RSS feed subscriptions and social media sites are visited in record numbers Journalists using Google News surpass usage of major networks, like MSNBC & CNN! A consistent public relations program (that might include press releases) will help build general awareness of your product, service or brand and will supplement any direct marketing and advertising efforts
Friday we broke the news that Google updated their link schemes webmaster guidelines. Now that the dust has settled, I aimed at getting more clarification on what Google meant by the new example around keyword-rich anchor text links within articles or press releases.
About six months ago, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, made a comment in a Google forum thread that links within press releases won’t “benefit your rankings.” Since then, we showed one case where Google not only discovers the links within typical press releases but… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.