I used to run a PR firm, and I still do a good deal of PR writing. Press releases are naturally something I come across a lot with my client work. While there are plenty of mistakes businesses can make when drafting or distributing their press releases, one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is just downright silly (and easily fixed). Businesses don’t post their press releases to their own websites.
The biggest excuse I’ve gotten about why a client doesn’t post their press releases to their own site is that they’re afraid of being penalized for duplicate content. When I hear this I feel like an old schoolmarm wanting to smack their hands with a ruler or make them sit in the corner with a dunce cap for a little while. It’s a bad excuse. It’s a terrible excuse. It’s a stupid excuse!
Why Duplicate Content Doesn’t Matter
The duplicate content fear only happens when someone puts SEO above their readers, customers, and image. That’s not smart business. Yes, SEO can be important. I won’t argue that. But if you’re doing something newsworthy enough to warrant a press release in the first place, then you’re well beyond SEO alone.
The point is that having your press release on your own website can provide more than enough benefits to outweigh the (debatable) downsides of duplicate content on your company’s website.
Benefits of Posting Your Press Releases to Your Website
Here are five of the biggest benefits of keeping a copy of your press releases on your own website.
- Serves as an archive – One of the most basic benefits of publishing your press releases to your company website is that you’ll have an archive of your releases in one place. You can look back at past news quickly and easily before drafting a new release. You can pull them up to convert them into blog posts. You can access all of your company news without having to search third party sites or dig through files on your local machine.
- Offers background to journalists and bloggers – Even if your early press releases don’t get much coverage in the media, they can still be a worthwhile resource for journalists and bloggers conducting a later interview for a story. They can go to your site and view all of your past news without having to search for it. They basically get a timeline of what your company has done.
- Allows control over comments – While you can’t “control” the content of individual comments necessarily (or perhaps I should say “shouldn’t” instead of “can’t”), you do get to control whether comments are allowed or not directly on the release. Even more importantly, you can eliminate spam comments without hoping a distribution service does it for you, and your own responses to comments will be available directly on your site for future visitors to see as well.
- No risk of “expiration” – While some press release distribution sites leave your releases live indefinitely, others do not. I recently came across one which removes releases after three years. It makes sense on their end I suppose — pull irrelevant stories down the road to conserve resources. However, it goes back to having an archive. You should have some record of your releases available. While it might be tempting to just create a news page where you link to off-site releases, you never know if your distribution site will change, lose data in a hardware failure, merge with another, shut down, etc. Having your releases on your own site ensures they’re available as long as you want them to be.
News goes directly to your own audience / customers / readers – Should your own regular readers, customers, or visitors have to rely on a news engine to find news about your company? Ideally, no. Even if they might come across your news that way, they have a relationship with you already. It would probably be nice from their perspective to get the news right from you as soon as it’s released and not have to leave anything to chance. Even posting your releases to your blog can be a good option if you don’t have a newsroom area on the site. It just keeps your audience in the loop and makes them feel a little bit more important.
If these benefits aren’t reason enough for you to overlook your duplicate content concerns, here’s a suggestion — post it to your own site first. Let it get indexed (which can happen in a few hours) so it’s clear your site is the original source. Then go ahead and distribute the release to a wider audience. You’ll get the best of both worlds.
Nice roundup. I have one more point
I we post press release to lot of news publishing website, there is chance for spamming or original content.
In another way if we see, we may lose back links which we get from the news publishing website.
so i am not sure which one to be considered primarily either considering duplicate content or losing back links.
Another benefit to posting your own press releases is you can add a news sitemap to your site.
Excellent advice. Personally, I think if you're that worried about duplicate content, you can always tweak a piece so that it's subtly different.
I think if you post the release on your site first, this is ok is seo terms anyway. It's just like syndicating your content through rss.
I'm currently building a press release site, so I'm seeing the other side too. I don't want my site full of peoples' duplicate, 2nd hand content/news?!
Putting it on your site is more important. If your primary reason for putting out press releases is backlinks, your whole strategy is offbase. That's not how it works. And that's what would make it spam. Press releases should ONLY be used when there's real news, and when getting that news out is the primary concern. Backlinks are a nice side benefit, but they're just that — a side benefit.
Also note that when you focus on the media outlets and bloggers who care about your news (and their needs as in making it accessible when they visit your site), you better your chances of them picking up the story. Backlinks on a news distribution site are not very valuable in the grand scheme of things. They're on sites not directly relevant to yours, the releases aren't linked on the highly ranked pages very long before being archived, and the added value beyond the first site or two is rarely worth the time it takes to submit to more of them. Backlinks on valid outlets that pick up the story, however, are often able to reach a much more targeted audience, send better traffic, and lead to a nice trickle-down effect in smaller pick-ups (meaning even more, and more relevant, backlinks anyway).
Yep, that's just a type of archive.
A press release shouldn't be “tweaked” other than when it's used as a base for a real story. One press release is one press release, and it should archived the same way it was distributed.
If your purpose for starting a press release site is to get unique content for free (or even have people pay you to post it) so YOU do better in the search engines, then it doesn't sound like you know enough about what news releases are and how they're used to be running that type of site. That concerns me, because it's an incredibly common problem and press release sites of that nature are what caused the problem of press release spam in the first place.
Thanks jennifer for your brief explanation. I got your points and the value of publishing press releases in our own website…
I am not sure about this..but doesnt google penalize adsense publishing websites for posting similar content across domains, even it is a press release? am i missing something?
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“The duplicate content fear only happens when someone puts SEO above their readers” Totally agree, but I will not regret of using useful SEO tips for avoiding duplicate content.
I just started using press releases and was concerned about duplicate content. Your points were helpful, thanks.
Our marketing department always re-post the media releases that we send to PR WEB.