Do "mentions" without hyperlinks help in search engines?

[JustinMc]

We have a fairly new site that we are trying to get publicity for by contacting news organizations and offering press releases as well as myself as an expert in the credit card field. We've been contacted by a number of news organizations and I've been quoted and our Web site's URL has been mentioned in the articles. However, none of the stories thus far has actually hyperlinked to our site -- its always been in plain text.

The news mentions alone bring traffic and are very worthwhile; however, I'd obviously like our site to show up more often in search results and I know hyperlinks help -- but do these "mentions" help us at all, or is it only hyperlinks that matter?

We are very, very reluctant to get into any sort of link exchanges after hearing too many horror stories of sites being thrown out of the engines; we really want to stick to providing good content, getting mentioned in news articles and letting quality links develop at a slow pace.

Anyone have an answer to this?

Thanks,
Justin

[Swebbie]

The mentions won't really help your cause from a ranking standpoint - not directly. But the mere fact of your site being mentioned prominently will result in lots of traffic. That will spawn lots of one-way links to your site, if the content is killer. So indirectly, it's probably going to help more than you know now. I'd be surprised if you didn't see a lot of links popping up when you do a link popularity check. Best of all, they'll be one-way links, which definitely help immensely in the rankings.

[WebDude911]

Hi, just along this topic, what about Image Source URLs?

For instance, if you are engaged in an affiliate program and the A HRef links from affiliates point to the affiliate provider before pointing to you, but the Image Source Urls are coming directly from your domain, is there any benefit to this from a Link Popularity standpoint?

If there is any benefit, would it matter if the files were hosted on a subdomain (and separate server) or the primary domain?

Thanks!
-WebDude

[jaffstar]

Why not contact these sites and ask them to make your link live , for a small fee ofcource :)

[JustinMc]

I'm hesitant to ask for a link versus just the mention because I think it comes off as too markety -- I want the media to continue to contact me and want to appear professional. Asking for a link in the story appears unprofessional, I think.

If they had called me for info and then not mentioned our site at all, I would absolutely contact them, but asking to change the plain text to a link seems to me to be pushing it.

[Frequent]

If they run a story about a web site they'd be crazy NOT to include a live link in my opinion.

It's just to be expected isn't it?

Freq---

[JustinMc]

Yes, but the news stories say "of example.com" as if it's a business name (which it is), they don't say http://www.example.com -- in the latter case, you definitely would expect a live link, but not necessarily in the first case.

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:33 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2005]
[edit reason] examplified. [/edit]

[tedster]

This is a frustration with several of my clients. One of them, for instance, is a new online presence for a long-standing business. They hired a PR firm who placed many nice articles, both online and offline. Not one of the online articles actually hotlinks (and two are from big name sites with PR8 home pages.

I think the absence of links is intentional -- and I can confirm that a mere mention\ does nothing to help in the SERPs. I'm still hoping for the viral pickup and natural links to kick in.