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 The idea of an 'SEO optimised' press release is very outdated in terms of both Google changes and how stories are picked up by journalists and bloggers.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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Can Twitter help my Google search rankings?

comScore_2012_Mobile_Future_in_Focus.pdf Download this file

The simple answer is 'yes'. 

A help forum comment from Google representative John Mueller explains:

Rest assured, Googlebot doesn't just count words on a page or in an article, even short articles can be very useful & compelling to users.

For example, we also crawl and index tweets, which are at most 140 characters long. That said, if you have users who love your site and engage with it regularly, allowing them to share comments on your articles is also a great way to bring additional information onto the page. Sometimes a short article can trigger a longer discussion -- and sometimes users are looking for discussions like that in search.

That said, one recommendation that I'd like to add is to make sure that your content is really unique (not just rewritten, autogenerated, etc) and of high-quality. to bring additional information onto the page. Sometimes a short article can trigger a longer discussion -- and sometimes users are looking for discussions like that in search. 

 

Also, John Mueller has an awesome avi on Google+ and you should go and look at it :)

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Samsung and Android continue US mobile dominance

With Apple's prowess in marketing it's easy forget what a critical role the carrier plays in manufacturer and platform market dominance. 

Google touts 'choice' as its big advantage over Apple with more carriers, manufacturers and handsets. 

Recent survey data from comScore shows that Samsung is still the leading OEM brand in the US market with 25.6% of US mobile subscribers, followed by LG and then Apple. 

Google Android is the number one smartphone platform with over the half the market share (Apple has just over one third). 

 

Top Mobile OEMs 3 Month Avg. Ending Jul. 2012 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Apr. 2012 Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers (Smartphone & Non-Smartphone) Ages 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of Mobile Subscribers
	Apr-12	Jul-12	Point Change
Total Mobile Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Samsung	25.9%	25.6%	-0.3
LG	19.2%	18.4%	-0.8
Apple	14.4%	16.3%	1.9
Motorola	12.5%	11.2%	-1.3
HTC	6.0%	6.4%	0.4

Smartphone Platform Market Share

More than 114 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in July, up 7 percent versus April. Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 52.2 percent market share (up 1.4 percentage points), while Apple’s share increased 2 percentage points to 33.4 percent. RIM ranked third with 9.5 percent share, followed by Microsoft (3.6 percent) and Symbian (0.8 percent).

Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Month Avg. Ending Jul. 2012 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Apr. 2012 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
	Apr-12	Jul-12	Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Google	50.8%	52.2%	1.4
Apple	31.4%	33.4%	2.0
RIM	11.6%	9.5%	-2.1
Microsoft	4.0%	3.6%	-0.4
Symbian	1.3%	0.8%	-0.5

 

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Resourcing for big data marketing

The Guardian is doing a lot of work on 'data journalism' to drive traffic and clicks to site. 

Most companies have a lot of raw data and some have software that can group and benchmark (Media Monitors, Google analytics, Radian6), but raw data sets aren't very helpful. 

Have a look at some of the work that they've done for the Olympics and think about the resourcing requirement you need to publish this kind of content. 

From a functional perspective, you'll need a data analyst, a journalist or editor and a graphic designer. 

You'll need a data analyst to receive the brief from the journalist about the story they're trying to tell e.g. "I want to see the top 12 things the data is showing us from the Olympics."

The analyst can then pull the data and decide with the journalist the best way of presenting the information e.g. infographic. 

The analyst and journalist can then brief a graphic designer to produce the infographic or charts in time for the deadline-you need to make sure the information is timely for the news event. 

Once the final visual is agreed, then the journalist can write the story around the data and publish to site. Online and social teams can push out the story and drive conversations and traffic across company channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google +. 

What does your company do with its data and how do you tell the stories around it to add value to customers? 

 

 

 

 

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Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2012-2016

PWC are predicting a moderate, 5.3 % growth in the global advertising industry today with the release of their 2015 outlook. 

The global advertising market is expected to grow from $434 billion in 2010 to $588 billion in 2015, increasing on average by 6.2 percent per annum (2011-2015). 

The correction is welcome after the hard trading of 2008-09.  

The PWC segment categories are a little confusing with digital and social grouped into the generic category of 'internet' which doesn't provide a lot of insight; focusing on the channel rather than the device. 

The Forbes VSS Industry Forecast 2011-2015 predicts 5.7% growth with consumer internet and mobile fueling spend at 18.1%. PWC predicts around half this at 9.6%. 

The PWC newspaper growth rates between 1.0 and 2.5% seem optimistic considering the revenue drags experienced throughout the US and major restructure announcements in the Australian industry. The Forbes VSS Industry Forecast 2011-2015 predicts a global decline of 3.8% which seems more realistic. 

Static numbers in outdoor and trade media support the theory that digital will continue to extend the media mix rather than cannabalise it-encouraging news for both media companies and agencies. 

The challenge now is for the media companies to redesign their organisations as quickly and painlessly as possible so they can deliver advertising products that work. Traditional revenues are still well behind what's needed to transition to digital and the people managing the heavily siloed structures are not designing products that reflect consumer media consumption. 

How fast newer players such as Google, Facebook and Twitter can design and sell ad products that will compete for significant amounts of spend (10%+) still remains uncertain. 

 

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How will content shifting impact on advertising revenues?

The paywall debate is an important one but let’s go under the hood and look at the real question large media companies such as Fairfax, Facebook and News Ltd need to be asking themselves.

How will content shifting impact on my advertising revenues?

Paywall and display advertising work fine when the audience gathers around the main dot com site to view the stories.

What happens when the content is moved to aggregators such as Storify?

The partnership announced yesterday at Le Web between Google + and Flipboard demonstrates that Google is trying to get out in front of these changes and develop aggregation functionality inside their products for inevitable content shifting.

If readers aggregate RSS feeds for tablet or mobile device, obviously the complexity of the ad products will be lost.

Digital advertising products that command the most money such as pre-rolls, skyscrapers or page buyouts are lost on third party aggregators . So either the aggregator takes over the advertising and you syndicate content to them, or you create a walled garden (paywall) and stop content sharing.

Arguably, the death of Myspace was its walled garden model. Facebook learned from MySpace’s errors and have taken brave steps to make content on their site shareable. Facebook still haven’t figured out how to adserve mobile or third party aggregators.

Paywalls are part of the solution but don’t truly reflect multi device media consumption.

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