Search Engine Land broke the news recently that Panda 4.0, the newest update to how Google ranks websites for search, has apparently come down heavily on the many press release sites that have become a standard part of the SEO arsenal. You know the sites: generalized dumping grounds for press releases on every topic, where companies could post anything formatted as a news release to eke out some SEO benefits.
It’s hardly surprising if Google has chosen to demote these sites. Google’s express intent for years has been to rank sites highly in search based on merit. Past efforts to game the system, such as keyword stuffing (adding lots of keywords to text that don’t add to meaning but fool search engines) have all fallen in turn.
But the press release sites lingered. Partly, this is because many capitalized on naive companies believing that journalists actually read such sites to get story ideas. They don’t. Many journalists receive over 200 press releases a day and don’t read those, let alone press release sites. So as PR, these sites are useless. Yet they did become a wasteland of bad PR in the form of broadcast releases.
SEO-savvy marketers were posting press releases to these sites solely to gain yet another mention of their brands, which could translate into a slight boost in search visibility. It’s content of no merit, however, put up just to game the SEO system. Hours of time that could have been spent writing content that would genuinely convince potential customers was instead spent spamming up these sites. It was a holdout of old-school SEO, the kind that was not focused on creating good websites but on tricking people to find and come to any site. But companies pay dearly for this kind of SEO spamming, because it alienates potential customers once they realize a site is not what they thought it was. Like all forms of trying to take business shortcuts, SEO gamesmanship and amateur PR end up hurting the very organizations that were trying to get ahead without delivering quality.
Let’s hope that this move from Google will further encourage companies to build quality community and communications programs which is where the real SEO and PR wins can be found. They will benefit all of us more in the long run.
To read more about the new update, go to
searchengineland.com
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