Do You Still Use Press Releases for Traffic?

What is a Press Release? Are you talking about new products or informing newspapers and blogs to write about you?

I think Google cares less about what we arbitrarily call our content and is more concerned about quality information.

If you publish a "Press Release" that is filled with garbage it's still filled with garbage, no matter what you call it.
If you publish a "Blog" with Press Release type information and it's gold... then well it's filled with Gold and Google will love it.

Care less about what we as humans arbitrarily call our content and focus more on the substance and you'll be fine and dandy.

Generally Press Releases (at the time I'm writing this post) are seeing a short term stick for reputation management purposes. However they are carrying some nice weight for building domain authority and trust. The most important thing is do not do anything unnatural with your anchor text as it will overoptimize your website pretty quickly. I'd recommend linking out with a reference to your Brand or URL and then maybe a FB/Twitter account.

As far as traffic goes, if you don't have anything noteworthy to say then it's going to be somewhat of a waste as it is not going to get syndicated as well.

Most free PR services are low quality and spammed pretty heavily by SEOs. A paid service is generally going to give you better results, but don't be fooled as many services will get you the same distribution but the price they charge will vary dramatically.

I use sometime for build link without forum and social media.

Social networks are better than Press releases for traffic. Learn how to use socials and it will brings you more traffic and you will safe your time.

If your website is new then it's a good way however in the long run PR is not a trustful source for search engines

I run a Press Release site and can tell you that things have certainly changed in terms of ranking and traffic in the last say 5 years or so. They used to be a pretty surefire way to get links with optimized anchor text and they ranked well in the search engines. This led to lots of spammy releases in addition to real ones, and Google took action to push press releases down in the rankings and reportedly devalue the pagerank from links in the releases. Most press release services now use nofollow links to better comply with Google's goals.
Press releases at one point were a good way to get press coverage, but not so much any more (unless you are a major publicly traded company). To get press stories written about you, it's much better to personally contact a writer/editor or use a PR firm that has those relationships.
BUT press releases are still effective at getting your company/product news into Google News, into search engines, published through syndication to news websites for credibility, and to social media where they can be hashtagged/liked/retweeted/etc. It's a quick and affordable way to do a touch of PR and SEO, and get some traffic, but I would use it to round out your other PR/SEO/Marketing activities. For incredibly newsworthy press releases, go direct to a writer with an exclusive and maybe use BusinessWire or PRNewswire after. The main issues with the free services are that they often upsell you for links/images etc so it is not really free, or they put ads in your release, and they tend to attract more spammy releases which can then become targets for the search engines.
Hope this helps. Feel free to message me any questions and I will give you honest answers from a first hand perspective.
Brian (PRUnderground.com)

Press Releases still work and can bring you targeted traffic and a backlink.

What i refer to as PR Spamming doesn't work anymore as they were essentially poor quality releases that no one cared about.

Maybe because my niche is so small and specific I don't use a service I contact journalists directly and build a relationship with them. This has lead to coverage in major publications and appearances on TV and Radio.

You need to be aware that the life time value of a press release is quite short yeah you get the odd one or two later on but mainly you get most of your traffic within a specificed amount of time.

The biggest thing is no one give a sh*t about you or your product - a journalist wants to know why their audience will care and what it means to them.

Avoiding being spammy and tie your story to real world problems or news events and if it looks like you are helping the journalist out then you are onto a winner.

Alternatively send a whole host of 'buy my sh*t' emails and you'll be left twiddling your thumbs

Press Releases have their place in a company's marketing arsenal. They can be very effective for reaching out to media outlets.