I think I dodged a bullet with press release

badhabitsdestroyer

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Hi, I guess I'm a slowpoke with this, but still wanted to share..

Recently I discovered "press release" and decided to read about it. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw many vendors offering AP News placement!

I wanted to order a press release and noticed a bunch of companies and even here you can order press release distribution. Spent couple days thinking which company to pick.

I wanted to use it to get a bunch of backlinks, even nofollow.

But the more I researched the stronger I felt the taste of shit in my mouth.

Every PR vendor brags with AP News placement. But if you open a PR item there, e.g. this one: https://apnews.com/press-release/ei...unity-impact-81f7c1cc9cebc66df0dc31a58805853e

And you will open DevTools and check what's written in the <head> section: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Wow, it means that it won't even be a backlink! Zero SEO value, zero link juice.

OK, maybe some journalist might notice it? Well good luck. And I'll explain why.

There are 18 wires sections (the place where one wire puts its news) on AP News.
Each section has 35 items published for the current day.
Each section daily fills up with totally new PRs. Every day the whole page refreshes, because there are a ton of new PRs! So don't even hope it will stay there for a few days. It will be gone next day! Look at dates - every publish date is today.

The funniest thing is that wire section doesn't have pagination! What does it mean? It means it's not only non-indexable, but is also non-navigationable!

This breaks the last point: discoverability by journalists (if you wanted to argue that journalist might notice your PR and write a story about it).
Imagine how hard it would be for a journalist to stumble upon your story, if he can't even find it on the site. Only once per day. And you should be a giant optimist to think that journalist monitoring everyday these news wires. Even then, if he sees it, your PR must be something phenomenal to be picked up by a journalist to write a story. But who are we kidding? We wouldn't needed PR in the first place if we had such a powerful story to share.

Good old - "too good to be true". And AP News are doing this just to earn money from dummies thinking it will blast their SEO rankings in the SKYYY, yeah baby! Money in the eyes.
So they are ones "selling shovels to gold diggers" in this case.
They take your money, place your link, and make sure avoid any SEO damage from your link, by not only "nofollowing" the link, but by "noindexing" it whatsoever and doubling the effect by removing your item from navigation.

Lastly, PR vendors publish PRs on pretty questionable websites that are owned by one company using the same theme and a just different logo. Pretty much all vendors who show their list publicly are these same network of sites, trying to look like real "FOX", "CNBC", "NBC", etc, but are knock-offs, e.g. (fox21news.com) - they're not even affiliated with FOX.

Some even use funny knock-off logos like "mediaworldtoday.com" (very similar to Mediamarkt company's logo, which isn't even news website, but an online shop).

Sometimes there are small super weak sites that are glowing in red on semrush saying "dangerous, don't get backlink from here, it's link farm!"

So, personally, seeing all this I'm pretty disappointed about PR, I'm pretty sure now that this is a scam.

What do you think?
 
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Nofollow is acceptable but noindex is not.
Yeah, but those sites.. I mean they're link farms - organized in a wheel link.

And a distributed press release is a copy of the same text over and over again = content duplicate.
I think Google totally can distinguish between PR and real content piece.
It doesn't punish for it (if not those link farm sites), but also must not be very happy about a fresh site getting same content piece with link from bunch of news sites.

There are PR services and there are "PR services".
$97 deals are not gonna cut it
Exactly. And as soon as I contacted more serious news companies they don't even tell me numbers. They want to have videocalls with me, which I hate.
And they will tell me $x,xxx as many people report on reddit and xtwitter.
 
You make some solid points—press releases can still have value for brand awareness, but they’re definitely not the magic bullet for SEO many vendors promise.
 
The press release is to get traffic from SERPS noindex defeats the whole purpose.No one will see that article.
 
Thanks for your research! I'm interested in a reputable "real" PR service. Anyone have suggestions?
 
Also there're other examples like https://www.investing.com/ who also sell press-release placements, but they put disallow in robots.txt, so that your links won't get indexed.

Meaning your links won't get indexed.

I see they like to play with its subpage allow/disallow. so freshest wayback machine robots: https://web.archive.org/web/20250823083219/https://www.investing.com/robots.txt

Sometime ago they had subpages allowed: https://web.archive.org/web/20250705080539/https://www.investing.com/robots.txt

But disallowed them recently.

Even if you try Google inspection tool to crawl their press release, it gets blocked, here's the report: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results/result?id=523DFGTOmq1sorF6IqCnNg

While homepage crawls fine: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results/result?id=syDd5bScTxTKf5WJVjZJxw



So if you want to try getting a backlink from someone, you need to check:
then you still have a chance of 99,99% getting a "nofollow" link. Which I think is pretty stupid to pay real money for.

Only if it's d0follow, but you'll spend much more time looking for it than elsewhere. Because the system is initially rigged to scam you.
 
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