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More Proof Google Counts Press Release Links, Using Matt Cutts’s Own Blog

Barry Schwartz on May 6, 2013 at 9:44 am

About six months ago, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, made a comment in a Google forum thread that links within press releases won’t “benefit your rankings.”

Since then, we showed one case where Google not only discovers the links within typical press releases but uses the anchor text for ranking purposes. Maybe it was one fluke, or maybe that particular case was not fair? In fact, Matt has said this numerous times that press release links don’t count.

The other day, Daniel Tan released another press release, this time on a smaller release site and added the anchor text “leasreepressmm” pointing to the blog of Matt Cutts. His goal was to get Matt’s blog to rank for leasreepressmm ,and guess what, it worked.

A search in Google for [leasreepressmm] returns Matt’s blog as number seven for me right now, only a few days after the press release was posted.

Of course, Matt could have meant it wouldn’t “benefit your rankings” for more competitive search terms?

For more on links, see our Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines chapter.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.