Do News Backlinks Help SEO?

If you are involved in SEO (or even just digital marketing), you might be engaged in the frustrating yet addictive process of link building. Google’s ranking depends on over 200 ranking factors, but the undeniable fact is that, compared to other factors, link building and content marketing carry more weight. Unless you have strong backlinks boosting your website’s authority, your high-traffic value keywords won’t rank in the top three results on Google search.

200 Factors Affecting Google Rankings News Backlink Building: Direct Impact For years, before Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms, news release backlinks were one of the main sources for link building.

But are news release backlinks still applicable for SEO today?

Google has publicly stated that news release backlinks are not counted as a source for our backlink ranking. Matt Cutts said on the Google Webmaster Help Forum: “However, I hope that links from news release sites won’t help your rankings.”

Additionally, it’s important to note that news releases often come with nofollow tags, and nofollow tags won’t pass juice to your website, so they can’t help with SEO:

“ How does Google handle nofollow links? Generally, we don’t follow them. This means that Google won’t pass PageRank or anchor text through these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to remove the target link from our entire web graph. However, the target page may still appear in our index if other sites link to the target page without using nofollow, or if these URLs are submitted to Google via a sitemap. Also, please note that other search engines may handle nofollow behavior slightly differently.” Source

However, based on my experience of publishing hundreds of news releases, I can confidently tell you that these do indeed have an impact on improving website metrics. So, let’s say your domain authority (DA) is 15. After publishing news releases on so many sites, your domain DA will definitely jump to 20 or 25.

Does this affect Google? Of course not. Google doesn’t use Domain Authority, Majestic TF, or any of these metrics to assign rankings in their search results.

Does this help SEO? Yes, a lot. Indeed, it will greatly help increase the number of sites that link back to your site with do-follow tags. Just as you wouldn’t link back to another site with low metrics on your site (mainly because you think Google will penalize you), similarly, other sites won’t link to you unless you have good metrics.

News Backlink Building: Indirect Impact Let me be straightforward: news releases won’t have a direct impact on Google rankings because Google has zeroed out their impact on backlinks and because they usually come with nofollow tags. However, they do have an indirect impact on search results, mainly by increasing the auxiliary matrix and providing you with traffic, which is another important factor Google uses when ranking websites.

Another angle to consider when discussing news releases and SEO backlink functionality is branding. “New SEO” (meaning the set of techniques developed after the Penguin and Panda penalties) views branding as branding and mentions it as a valuable source of backlinks. I’m not saying you should give up on links and focus more on mentioning your website name, but in my personal view, branding has a significant impact on your rankings. Of course, in SEO, and in life in general, the best approach is to strike a balance between these techniques.

Let me explain the hypothesis of SEO branding: So, you are online marketing a new brand called “Namie,” and it can be said that many people in the online world have started mentioning your name. Naturally, Google will take notice. Now, according to “brand SEO,” using old-style backlinks and anchor text, your rankings will be higher than your competitors. With this method, trademarking your name will be more useful than acquiring a bunch of backlinks with spammy anchors and low metrics.

Now, let’s look at the news release scenario. Clearly, having many top-tier sites mention your name and link to your articles will make a difference.

As SearchEngineJournal mentions: “Brand search clicks generate more clicks and sales than SEO rankings. With the increasing trend of Google SERP shifting towards big brands, it’s time for small brands to spend more of their SEO budget and strategy on creating memorable brands.”