The SEO Value Of Syndicated Press Releases

Every company with a mature attitude to marketing wants to receive positive editorial in media publications. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Although it won’t guarantee you headlines in your target publications, writing and distributing high-quality press releases should be part of your overall strategy if you want to make a start in PR.

While grabbing column inches is the main purpose of getting your story out there, understanding the SEO value of syndicated press releases will mean you’ll be able to get more value from your releases and any work you do with a syndication service, for example, PRWeb or ResponseSource.

Get Your Story Out

If you’ve got a new product, received an award or been involved with something genuinely newsworthy then getting a press release in front of the right journalists can open the door to improved media relations and result in high-quality editorial for your brand.

Press release syndication can seem like a convenient and cost-effective way to get your press release circulated and published. But it’s easy to get carried away with the idea that once your release is written and syndicated it’s ‘job done’.

Many companies offer such a service. However, you need to be careful as this kind of syndication can have an adverse effect on SEO and your reputation, if not managed carefully.  Here are the main reasons why:

Duplicate content

If the same release is published on more than one website, Google may see that content as duplicate content. There are many myths about the negative effect of duplicate content – we explain more about duplicate content and why you need to avoid it in this article – but essentially Google tends to only rank one version of the content.

Nofollow links

If your press release is published on numerous news websites, the links back to your site will most likely be nofollow links. These have no impact at all on SEO and are in fact ignored by Google. Nofollow links contain code that tells search engines to ignore them, thus not helping to increase your search engine ranking, should the publishing site be authoritatively scored themselves.

Spammy sites

It’s hard or even impossible to control where your press release will appear if you syndicate through a ‘not so good’ provider. If published on a spammy or low authority website, this could adversely affect your ranking.

If your press release contains a link to your site and it’s published on a site Google considers to be of poor quality, then it will have an adverse effect on your ranking. Kind of like ‘guilt by association’, Google will look at the sites that connect to your own and rate accordingly.

So is syndication useless?

No.  It can be used to great advantage. When it comes to the SEO value of syndicated press releases – there aren’t many benefits, but you can still get something from syndication.

Bear this in mind when you use a press release syndication service:

• Use press releases as part of your editorial strategy, to provide leverage with journalists and to get a conversation started. One decent article is worth a lot more than having a press release published on 100 mediocre or poor sites.
• Only use services that are recognised as high quality and that can get your release out to a few, very specific publications that will help your brand. Avoid ones that may post your release on multiple news sites, scattergun fashion. Presswire, for example, sends to specifically targeted journos rather than just publishing on 3rd party news sites.
• Although nofollow links won’t help your SEO, they won’t harm it and can still provide valuable traffic. If you speak to the journalist working with your release, it’s also worth asking them if they can remove the nofollow link. They may not be able to, but it’s worth a try.

Need help with your press releases?

If you need a great press release quickly, with help to make sure it gets to the right people contact us.