📊Do press releases help a website rank higher on Google?

This is one of the most-asked questions in SEO forums, and one of the most poorly answered. Google's public position hasn't changed much since 2013 — but the reality of what happens after you distribute a press release definitely has. Both things matter.

Here's the honest, technically accurate answer, followed by the useful one.

The short answer

Traditional press releases distributed through big wires like PR Newswire or Business Wire have a small, mostly indirect effect on Google rankings. They almost never move the needle by themselves. Modern "dofollow" press release strategies — which combine publisher selection, content remixing, and drip scheduling — can move rankings meaningfully, and often do.

The gap between those two things is what this piece is about.

How the traditional model works (and mostly doesn't)

When you buy a release from a legacy wire, three things happen:

• →The release is published on the wire's own domain.
• →It gets syndicated to a network of partner sites — Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, AP News, Benzinga, hundreds of small local news portals.
• →Every single one of those placements attaches rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" to your links.

The nofollow attribute tells Google not to pass link equity through the link. It was introduced in 2005, tightened up over the years, and applied wholesale to press wire syndication after Google made its position clear in a 2013 statement from Matt Cutts that press release links should be treated like paid ads. John Mueller and Gary Illyes have reinforced that position multiple times since.

So the direct SEO value of a nofollow wire release is close to zero. But that isn't the whole story.

The indirect effects (this is where it gets interesting)

A press release, even a nofollow one, can help rankings indirectly. Three ways in particular:

1. Journalist pickups

Reporters read wires when they're researching a beat. Sometimes they'll cover a release on their own site — often with an editorial dofollow link. The pickup rate is low (industry averages sit under 5%) but the links you earn this way are genuine editorial links.

2. Second-tier scraping

Smaller sites and aggregators scrape wire content constantly. Sometimes they preserve links. Sometimes those links happen to be dofollow. You'll never know without checking Ahrefs a few weeks later, but the residual link profile from a well-distributed release is not zero.

3. Brand signals

Google increasingly uses brand mentions, entity recognition, and co-citation as ranking signals — separate from links. Being mentioned on 100 news sites in a week teaches Google's Knowledge Graph that your brand is a real thing. That entity signal quietly helps rankings across every page on your site.

The dofollow model: what changes

The service we run — and a small number of others — works differently. Instead of blasting a release across a nofollow syndication network, we place it on a curated set of news domains that have contractually agreed to keep the sponsored links dofollow. The article stays permanent, the link passes equity, and Google reads it as a normal editorial reference.

There are three ingredients that make this actually move rankings:

• →Dofollow attribution — the fundamental ingredient. Without it, everything else is theater.
• →Content remixing — the same release rewritten into 5-15 unique versions, so each publisher gets original text and Google doesn't discount it as duplicate syndication.
• →Drip scheduling — placements published across 10-15 days instead of a single-day spike. Natural link velocity, not a spammy footprint.

We break down the mechanics in more depth in how to use press releases for link building.

What kind of ranking lift is realistic?

Not the fictional "page 3 to page 1 in a week" stories some vendors promise. But movement is normal. In our own client data (see the 3-site case study), we see:

The pattern: newer, lower-authority sites feel the effect more strongly. Big established sites see smaller relative movements from the same campaign — they're already ranking on established signals.

Honest caveats

• →Press releases are not a substitute for a strong content foundation. If your page doesn't deserve to rank, no amount of link building will make it stick.
• →The dofollow model works because it's used carefully. Over-optimized anchors, thin content, or spam-adjacent topics will get placements pulled.
• →Google's 2024 site reputation abuse update has hit some low-quality sponsored-content networks. This is why publisher selection matters more than ever.