Over the years several companies have begun offering "press release" services online. These services are designed to help build awareness, exposure and in some cases search engine optimization to a website. Some of the top names in this space are RWeb, Marketwire and the free PRLog.

In the old days, press releases were used as an official way to make an announcement. They were picked up by newspapers (or pushed towards newspapers) and other news sources. With the advent of the internet and the coming of the information age there has been an increase in the number of channels through which to release "press" or to present news about a company and the web itself has become a leading way to make a press release.

If you're considering making a press release here's a quick gut check. Is your story news worthy? Is there an audience online that you can target? Are you prepared to create something professional that will be syndicated and republished, something that will stay online FOREVER in some capacity? Really, just knowing that these services exist is a great leg up and a new tool you can use to direct visitors to your site, but they should be used with care.

Why would you use a paid press release website vs. just publishing a release on your site? What does an online press release offer? Well, these news sites get hundreds and thousands of visitors and since they are always pushing out new content (on an hourly or even minute to minute basis) they get a lot of traffic from Google, Yahoo and other powerful indexing and distribution clients. There are also sites out there that just republish individual stories that fit the tone of their own sites, some of these sites are considered "scrapers" because they scrape unoriginal content off of other sites to boost their own but many are legit and are just keeping their own audiences up to date with a select vertical of news. Your site probably doesn't get the kind of traffic that these PR sites or their scrapers and republishers do so using a press release to announce an event, product launch or other milestone is a good way to broaden your reach. I have even used press releases to announce the creation and "launch" of sites I made after they'd already been around for six or more months. To me it's like telling people "okay, my project is now ready for the world to see" vs. "okay, I'm starting something now but it's only halfway complete." This kind of press release has driven a lot of traffic and interest from new sources and even the free PRLog has done it effectively.

So all is well and good... except! I have always been concerned and wary of over exposure and cheating my way up the search engine results and that includes buying links and scraping content from other sites. In some ways, press releases fall into this category because they allow you to "buy links" by creating and pushing a press release out. A leading engineer at Google named Matt Cutts has blogged about this phenomenon and explained that when Google sees a link on PRWeb and other PR sites it discounts the link (not counting it for SEO purposes), see the article here and look for where he talks about PRWeb specifically.

So to me, if a press release is done for the right reasons and done professionally, and... if it isn't a tool you overuse... and if you don't link keywords (I always prefer to list out the link as in http://sustainableonlinesolutions.com in the footer and let it auto-link) then... then! I see it as a useful and safe tool. Note that PRWeb and many other sites charge you more money for links in your press releases where you control the link text. To me this is something to avoid. I have paid $80 for PRWeb press releases (the cheapest version they offer) and been satisfied with the results and felt secure that I was not cheating my way to the top of Google's index or inviting a future ban or blacklisting... by contrast the $200 and $360 PRWeb options advertise themselves explicitly as "SEO" and to me that's just the same as buying links and something to be avoided. I even called PRWeb and spoke with a representative about this who of course, tried to up-sell me and explain how linking and link text work. To me it's just a gamble, it's cheating and it's a waste of money.

There are lots of conversations out there covering how Google discounts press releases and how all of this may or may not play out. Yeah, they are picked up by other sites, republished and linked again and again by scrapers, so does Google discount those links??? Google has also said they will never punish a site for things it cannot control such as inbound links... but if you buy inbound links from a site Google knows is cheating, you may get slapped! It has happened and people have lost their ranking, even for their own names. It's a severe consequence considering 80%+ of my traffic comes from Google's search engine.

Well, spending the money and being proactive in promoting yourself and your services is great and yeah you do get benefit but I am careful in how I approach this sort of offering, I think twice about the money and what sort of situation it would create if anyone could buy their way to the top of the search listings... Google does everything it can to penalize that kind of behavior because it's not good for surfers, you would end up bad results that way, inaccurate information. It would be like American politics, full of lying and cheating, and Google (and I) don't ever want to see that. Even using Google's own advertising tool, AdWords, you won't stay at number one if your clickthrough rate and bounce rates are too high, no matter how much you pay!

Don't be evil.