[Press Release Secret #4] Matt Cutts & Avoiding Google Penalties!

Earlier this week I received a question from our friend Chad, which I think would be helpful to share with everyone.   He wrote (shortened for brevity): "Google doesn't value press releases anymore. Matt Cutts himself has said that press releases have no backlink value."   And yes, Matt Cutts did tweet this.    In fact, a while back Google made an update to their terms of service which specifically said that they consider press releases to be a form of advertising. And all advertising, in Google's mind, should use nofollow links.   (There is nothing wrong with advertising, obviously. They sell it to you themselves. But if those links don't have the rel="nofollow" tag included, Google considers that manipulation and could give a penalty for it.)   They particularly are on the lookout for followed links that ALSO have keywords in the anchor text.   I apologize if any of this is confusing. Just hang on and I'll provide a simple summary.   Sounds bad, right?   Well actually, it's not that bad at all.  Here are a few things to keep in mind:   1) You don't need anchor text. Since penguin, we have been using WAY more "naked" links. Those are links without anchor text, where the URL itself is the anchor. And they're working really well! Especially when the keyword is already in the title of the page you're linking to.   2) Nofollow links are great. In fact, we use them all the time! There's been a ton of evidence showing that nofollow links actually help pages to rank, despite what Google says. And the cool part is, you're actually following their own rules! So the chance of penalty is quite slim.   In fact, most press release companies have switched over to automatically forcing nofollow on all their links since that announcement, and there hasn't been any issue.   3) Press releases rank amazingly well on their own. Obviously Google doesn't think they're complete crap, otherwise they wouldn't put them right at the top of their SERPs every time they find one! Which makes me feel really good about using them in the long term, overall, even if we never used them for link building.   4) Matt Cutts is often a source of misinformation. Any SEO who's been in the game for more than a few years knows that a big part of his job is to say scary things and try to intimidate people into not doing SEO. Some of what he says can be misleading if not totally inaccurate. Sorry Matt, but we have businesses to run and Google is just another competitor business in the big scheme of things.   5) For more info, here's a nice article by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land where he talks to John Mueller (one of Google's other top guys) about the specifics. He did a great job. Check it out: http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339   So, in summary, here's what we recommend:   Run a lot of press releases, because they offer awesome benefits. Just make sure you stay safe.  When we run our own, we usually nofollow all of the backlinks (the news wires generally do this for you anyway), and the links that we do use are almost always naked (no anchor / just the URL for anchor text.)    If you run the occasional press release with anchor text it's no big deal. As with everything in SEO and life, moderation is key.   Yours truly,   Bobby MacDonald Co-Founder, Penny Backlinks   P.S. I've been getting a lot of questions about what resources to use for submitting press releases, and tomorrow I will be going into detail on that. So hold on to your hats.   P.P.S. Thanks for all the positive feedback so far! Are you enjoying this series? Not enjoying? Love it? Too basic? Send a reply and let me know! I read all the replies even if I don't always have time to respond personally.

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