Press release sites?

What is your experience with press release sites

[maximus12]

This questions goes out to all webmasters who have used press release sites such as prweb and pr(dot)com. Yes you have to pay to submit your site to them but I have heard they do wonders.

I have seen most competition in my niche ranking in the first pages and they all have pres releases with these sites?

1) Can they improve your rankings and backlink profile?

2) Would google consider them paid links and penalize you?

3) Has anyone been penalized for using them?

Hope to get some feedback.
Thanks

[Getbetterlife]

I have registered more than 30 press release sites, they all bring trafic to my site <snip> Till now, I haven't found google penalized my site. Just write some useful and high quality articles. They are great places to build backlinks to your site and promote your business.

[edited by: bill at 6:40 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2009]
[edit reason] No personal URLs please [/edit]

[philipd]

I sent a release using ereleases.com about a year ago and got great media coverage. Which in turn, built credibility for my site and produced some solid links. I've recently used prweb.com and didn't have much success. Frankly, I think that has as much to do with the content of the release rather than the platform.

[maximus12]

Thanks for sharing guys, very useful answers :)