You may have heard about the press release announcing a $400
million acquisition by Google last week that turned out to be fake after the
story had gone viral and been picked up by legitimate news organizations.
PRWeb, the big distributor of press releases online, made it out to be an
anomaly that somehow escaped their fact-checkers but In a fascinating article
the SEO blog Search Engine Land debunks that and shows a lot of seamy underside
of PR content online. For starters, many news organizations republish press
release material en masse in the back corners of their sites to boost indexing.
TO make matters worse, Google and other search engine news channels have gotten
worse at suppressing these results so that an obvious scam (the author uses a
PRWeb-distributed release for online Viagra purchases) ends up not only
indexing on a news site but on Google News, significantly boosting visibility.
There are some obvious lessons for digital marketers and,
no, that’s not to engage in black hat SEO marketing:
·
Don’t ignore the combined power of digital and offline marketing. One
might have predicted the death of the press release (or press conference) when
Google arrived on the scene. Instead, marketers need a spectrum of content from
text and display ads, to press releases to branded content.
·
Distribution is cheap. News sites still rely on eyeballs (for now) to
make money and that means a low bar for content. If your content is better than
a poorly-written Viagra ad, you should be able to get better distribution terms
and reach.
·
Watch where you play. The blog post’s author uses another press release,
for vitamins, to illustrate how pervasive these search results are. One thing
marketers can be certain about is that Google will take aim at this sooner or
later. Make sure you’re not mistaken for the bad guys when the next
Panda-type
update hits.
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