Press releases will help both with SEO (as you may get a good number of links), traffic (if the news is interesting), brand recognition, etc. So I would not say they don't help, on the contrary they do help. But it is up to you to get a well written pr and not something written poorly.I found there are a number of press release companies, prweb, prnewswire and ereleases, but reviews say that they are written poorly and affected by Google updates. Part of an article I read said they don't help with SEO either. Why do them?