Will links in my press release help with Google search rank?

It's official. They won't. Google's head of webspam Matt Cutts answered a forum question about it yesterday and I've included the full text below. 

There's a lot of nonsense about this one and I've blogged about it before. The idea of an 'SEO optimised' press release is very outdated in terms of both Google changes and how stories are picked up by journalists and bloggers.

Making sure that your information is newsworthy and well targeted to media contacts is far more important than any formatting or tricky back linking.  You want humans in newsrooms to read your headline, open your story and find it interesting enough to do something with. Speed to market and relevance is your focus.

A press release is a simple memo to let people know that something has happened. Some practioners make it out to be a lot more complex than it needs to be.

Can Press Releases count as spam links?  7 posts by 4 authors in Webmaster Central Categories:  Crawling, indexing & ranking

MT-28Level 1

Post reply Dec 24

I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. 

Hi,

I am wanting to issue a press release about our new site and product, however, I noticed that there is a lot of talk about getting penalized if too many links point to a website too quick.

I am researching press release companies to make sure the one I choose only sends the PR out to legit news media and online media, but I do not want to get penalized if they link to my website.

Does anyone have any advice about this?

Thank you,

Lynn

seo101Level 15

Post reply Dec 24

Yes, if the news is not really "news" and the purpose of the press release is just to get backlinks to the site.

No, if the news really is "news" and the purpose of the press release is to provide journalists with information for a story.

....as to how well the Google algorithm is as detecting the difference between the two, then that is open to debate. But over time the algorithm will improve and get better as distinguishing between the two.

As for being penalized, unlikely. At worse all that happens is the links will be ignored as a ranking signal. They only way you could get penalized by this is the pattern of all the links to the website are gained by this self promotional link building techniques.

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seo101Level 15

Post reply Dec 24

BTW, "I noticed that there is a lot of talk about getting penalized if too many links point to a website too quick"

Its just talk. If a video or web site go 'viral', they do not get penalized for getting too many links too quickly, so its a myth.

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MT-28Level 1

Post reply Dec 25

 I am not looking to build links; I just wanted to issue the press release but did not want any incoming links to hurt my site.  Thank you for the info, Merry Christmas

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travlerLevel 13

Post reply Dec 25

Major media can often set any links in online version to nofollow. 

And yes, if a legitimate news story, then send direct to media, and the appropriate editor.

Email works best with a good subject line, Faxes are ignored as a rule. Just too many of them to wade through.

Major media tend to use a release as the basis to write the story in their style, for their audience.

Online press releases are often copied verbatim, and appear on scraper sites.

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Matt_Cutts

Post reply     Dec 26

Note: I wouldn't expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however.

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