Real estate agents and brokers are constantly looking for ways to promote their business and services. One good way has always been to send a press release whenever a bit of good news happened. For example, if you received a new professional endorsement, recently joined the ranks of Realtors, or made the $1 million sales club, it was simply time to send a press release.
By sending a press release you had the potential to gain additional exposure from new sources. Whether it be from radio, TV, or print, the more exposure you got the better chance you could increase your business.
Print media who picked up and liked your press release would likely either run the information in the release, or contact you for an interview. The additional benefit from print media, especially those online, was the backlink potential to your website from the publication of your press release.
But recently in the United Kingdom, Google has bared its fangs at the linking process of major online news publications. Through the natural selection process of consumer demand, newspapers have been forced to shut down much of their paper distribution and create a news website where readers are picking up most of their news nowadays. But to pay the bills and to keep their website content free to readership, newspapers have practiced selling ads and accepting paid links for their article pages.
This practice of selling links is frowned upon by the search giant, Google. According to Google, links on another site to your website should be legitimate, not paid. Google blogger, Matt Cutts, says about the practice:
“Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.”
Unfortunately this process of selling links has landed newspapers in hot water. Thus, they are removing these links to stay in good graces with Google. And, unfortunately, press release links seem to be categorized as a “paid” link and are also being removed. If this is true and Google continues to demand and enforce press release links to be removed from online news sources, real estate agents will have a much more difficult time indeed with public relations SEO.
Tags: press release, SEO
Are most of these paid links in newspapers “nofollow?” If so, it shouldn’t hurt anyone.
Actually several well known newspaper sites were selling dofollow paid links.
This is quite interesting news…well then I guess Google should be on the watch then for offenders breaking the rules because this scenario is quite common and rampant. Thanks for the interesting post…
I understand Google, it was not only real estate agents and brokers who did this. It was the big poker sites, restaurants, car companies, ect. They have put it in system to get free and strong links from the press. The small companies dident have a fair chance in the SERP.
There was a time when using the free press release forums was of an seo benefit but now they seem to have no effect or value. I no longer make use of them as they no longer rank.
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