GOOGLE CAN’T KILL PR THAT EASILY
Earlier this month Google updated its webmaster guidelines. It caused a kerfuffle on the interwebs, and after reading the article “Did Google just kill PR agencies?” by Tom Foremski, you may have been a bit confused or worried as well about what it meant for your life as a PR professional or marketer. It definitely spurred us to take a harder look at what the new rules really mean.
As a marketing/PR agency, we regularly distribute news releases for our clients. The distribution method varies depending on the goals for the release, but never is that release solely intended to boost SEO results. However, when the widest distribution is needed we often use a wire service, which features an SEO component. After reading Foremski’s article, we looked at the new rules, as they related to releases on the wire.
We came to two conclusions:
- News release links will no longer be counted in SEO, but can and should be used to drive readers back to a specific landing page where they can get more information on the release topic.
- As long as your news release only contains good, naturally relevant links to topics or products actually covered in the release, you shouldn’t have any problems, or notice much of a difference.
Our practice to only include links that make sense, and not depend on them for SEO, is already in line with Google’s new rules. The important thing to remember is the change in guidelines is to catch people gaming the system, not punish companies for distributing news releases. A normal link or two in a release that brings a reader to additional relevant content will be fine. Also, since news releases don’t live that long, they don’t have long term benefits to page rank anyway. Adding a ‘no follow’ tag to a link, if necessary, won’t be a problem.
Ultimately, news releases and SEO are only two small parts of what PR and marketing is all about. They are each just one tool in the shed. It will take a lot more than a shift in webmaster guidelines to kill PR. To echo what Steve Barret noted in his article, “No Tom, Google didn’t just kill PR agencies,” it has been years since PR was simply putting out a news release (in our opinion, that was never the sole task of PR), and SEO came and went as a driving force behind releases. Today, SEO and news releases are just two-of-many ways we can spread a client’s message.