Free press releases vs. PRweb case study.

[MemberWing]

I decided to come up with the strategy to judge value of free press releases using automated software vs. $80 press release via PRweb.com

I purchased popular recommended software for free press release submission. Wrote unique press release, created 20+ accounts on free press release sites and pushed the button. After few errors and verifications my release was sent to about 20 sites.

Right after that I wrote another unique press release on the same subject and submitted it to PRweb via $80 option.

Tracking:
My real time google alerts were already setup. Presumption is that if Google deem certain page to be valuable - alert will be sent.

Results:
From 20 free press releases submitted - 1 alert was delivered from this PR2 site: Press Release News Album Search And Browse Over 4000 News Sources Updated Continuously - news album. Press release on it was pestered with adsense and other ads around it.

From 1 press release submitted to PRweb - I got so far about 5-6 alerts from different sites. This release made it to news.google.com, news.yahoo.com and a few other lower grade PR4-PR5 sites.

Conclusion:

1. Free submission tools are losing their value as Google pays significantly less attention to free "automatable" properties. Lack of alerts from plethora of free press release sites means that Google is not care about these properties and any links from them are likely be wortless.
2. PRweb delivers value for the money. Even for $80 (lowest cost option) release - links are do-followed and overall release looks more professional than on free sites. Major news aggregators are serious about PRweb contents likely due to the manual editorial review that each release gets there.

Followup Tip:
To find "important" free PR sites for your niche - go to news.Google.com and search for your keyword. Note pr sites that are popping up on pages. Some of them are free. One notable one is: 1888pressrelease.com . Sumbit your news release to them.

Gleb

[Justin Mandel]

Gleb, thanks for posting - it's a terrific comparitive study, but I am not all too sure that your conclusion is a correct one.

Is the reason behind this the "free 'automatable' properties" OR that you submitted identical press releases without spinning them which would actually be flagged because of dup. content?

Originally Posted by MemberWing

Conclusion:

1. Free submission tools are losing their value as Google pays significantly less attention to free "automatable" properties. Lack of alerts from plethora of free press release sites means that Google is not care about these properties and any links from them are likely be wortless.

Gleb

[Brad Gosse]

Gleb

I think many of us suspected this were true. Thanks for sharing these results!

[MemberWing]

2 press releases were different. First went to 20 free sites. Second (different) went to PRWEB.

Free sites generated only 1 alert.
PRWeb generated 6 alerts even though all 6 sites had unique content.

So pages having identical content does not matter. What matters is "importance" of pages/sites.

Gleb