Semi-useless PRWEB articles

Will they help or hurt long term?

[mindaugas13]

I've been seeing more and more articles posted via PRWEB that are obvious self-promotion pieces and not anything that I would consider useful. However, some people might consider them informative.

To me it's not quite spam but its not quite an article either. In addition, PRWEB allows you to place an iframe at the end of the "story" with the originator's website. The stuff shows up through Google newsfeeds so it comes through my alerts.

Is this clever and effective marketing with some SEO benefit kicked in? Or will Google start seeing through this and devalue it (and maybe even penalize) in the future?

[graywolf]

I believe Matt Cutts (google engineer) mentioned on his blog PRWeb doesn't pass pagerank.

[sugarrae]

>>>articles posted via PRWEB that are obvious self-promotion pieces

That is because they're press releases, not articles and they are made to promote (eathier stealthily or obviously) a specific company. If you take the time and effort to craft a good press release, you might get picked up by reporters (and in some industries, bloggers), which, IMHO, is where the real value comes from.

[SincerelySandy]

My experience has been along the lines of what sugarrae posted. I may not get any link benifit directly from prweb, but I've found that the better the quality of my release the more websites that pick it up and consequently, the more links I get. I'm sure many of these links are passing value in traffic and PR. If I put out a lame release, I hardly get any links or traffic. If I put out a really good one, I get lots of links from sites that pick up the release, lots of traffic from sites that pick up the release, lots of phone calls from radio stations for interviews which result in good traffic and occasionally links, some calls for interviews from various news websites that want to write their own story to publish... more traffic and sometime links.

[ownerrim]

Any possible downside to using things like prweb? What about other similar sites? I think there's another one called prnewswire and maybe there are others.

[mindaugas13]

so other than the cost of pushing it out (which is fairy small), is there any disadvantage to doing this?

What I'm hearing is "can't hurt, might help"

[grant]

I believe Matt Cutts (google engineer) mentioned on his blog PRWeb doesn't pass pagerank.

I'd like to see that quote.

I spoke with someone from prweb at SES a few weeks ago about this issue.

Here's a test that I do to see if PR (and link reputation) is being passed:

1. Build an *orphaned* page on your site, "optimized" for a long word that you make up
2. Only link to it from the site you are "testing" for PR passage.

If, in a few weeks, your page ranks for your made up word, then you can assume PR is being passed. At the very least, link reputation IS being passed.

I'm planning on testing this on PRweb soon, as most of my clients use them for their releases. I'd be happy to report back the results.

[mindaugas13]

I'd like to hear back on your results. Anyone else know?