Several weeks back, Google Guru Matt Cutts made a statement that left some of us here at Eyeflow scratching our heads. According to Mr. Cutts, links to your website from press releases had no effect on your rankings.
Really, we thought? We hadn’t noticed that. We’ve been doing press releases for quite some time and had noticed that they did seem to benefit rankings. How could this be, we wondered? Were we doing something different or unique? No. So what was he talking about?
We kept the statement in the back of our minds, but pressed forward with our work. It turns out we aren’t the only ones in the business who thought this statement made no sense. Our friends at the SEO Consult blog decided to test this statement about press releases and they issued a release with anchor text that pointed to Matt Cutts’ own blog.
They made up a ridiculous word, “sreppleaseers,” and pointed the word to the blog and VOILA! It caused the blog to rank for that crazy word.
So what does this mean, really? It isn’t too hard to make up a crazy word that doesn’t exist and then rank for it. It could just be a publicity stunt, in which case we just walked right into it. It could be that press releases will help you rank for uncompetitive terms. But for now, we think that it means that utilizing press releases is still a great plank in a comprehensive SEO and link building platform.
