Question about press releases and Google indexing

[nairb]

I recently used PRBuzz to distribute a press release that I wrote myself (very good quality, appropriate content for a press release). PRBuzz will not report the exact links of the press releases it distributes, but essentially shows you how to find them yourself by checking the sites to which it distributes and scrolling through until you see your press release.

Through this method, I have been able to locate dozens of precise URLs that are showing my press release, complete with 3 backlinks to my affiliate site (each using targeted-keyword anchor text). However, searching in Google the "exact title" of my press release does not return anywhere near this many results.

My question is basically: does Google not index these extra links because it recognizes the other versions as duplicate content? It's true that each version is not unique and therefore is duplicate content, but I thought press releases were sort of immune to this sort of treatment by SEs. Am I wrong about that? Or is my information just old, and Google no longer indexes duplicate press releases?

Perhaps this was never actually the case, and duplicate press releases only served the purpose of exposing the news and affiliate links to actual people, as opposed to crawlers. Either way, it's a positive - but it would be much better if I could get each one of these links indexed. Which brings me to my next point... (Which involves some black hat seo)

Should I/Could I use something like scrapebox to create links to that outer wheel (non-indexed press releases) on blog comments and the like? Would this be an effective method to either A) getting the extra press releases indexed or B) simply increasing the web presence of my affiliate site (the money site) through an extra tier of backlinks?

I've heard that press releases aren't quite what they used to be in terms of SEO - perhaps this is exactly why. In any case, does anyone have any advice of how to take advantage of all these non-indexed press releases?

 

[shakemelikeapig]

I'Ve Always Thought Of Gaygles Duplicate Content Filter As A Bit Odd. Maybe the sites the pages that Arent Indexed are on just Arent Worth Much To Gaygle.

 

[rileyb]

Did you receive traffic from the other sites? Even if they are not showing up you may still get traffic from the syndication...please let me know I might try prbuzz..thanks

 

[nairb]

Did you receive traffic from the other sites? Even if they are not showing up you may still get traffic from the syndication...please let me know I might try prbuzz..thanks

I have not yet seen any significant increases in traffic, but I will let you know if this changes over the next few days. The press release was published on April 2nd so it's only been live for 48 hours.

I'Ve Always Thought Of Gaygles Duplicate Content Filter As A Bit Odd. Maybe the sites the pages that Arent Indexed are on just Arent Worth Much To Gaygle.

I checked the PR of the other sites' root domains (many of the URLs that hosted a copy of my press release included domain extensions like "finance.***.com" as opposed to "www.***.com") and almost all of them were PR4+, some as high as PR6. I can't say the same about the URLs where my press release is hosted, however. PR info was n/a for those URLs (makes sense because they're deep inner pages).

So it seems like the root domain does hold a lot of weight to SEs, but their inner pages do not. This might indicate that your hypothesis is correct: SEs don't care much about those domains that host my press release (i.e. "finance.***.com"). That -- coupled with the fact that they are duplicate content -- would make sense for those URLs not being indexed.

Too bad, because I had previously thought press releases would not be penalized for duplicate content because they're supposed to be exactly the same everywhere they appear.

It would be great if someone with more detailed knowledge of press releases and SEs would respond! (Not to say I'm ungrateful for the input of those who already posted, I just still have outstanding questions to be answered)