Press releases and SEO

What a release can do for search

Four effects are realistic:

• Discovery. Google says it finds pages mainly through links from pages it has already crawled. A release on established news sites that links to your site is one more way in, alongside a sitemap and Search Console.
• Your brand’s search results. When someone searches your company name, pages about you on other sites can appear next to your own. A release is one of the few such pages you can create yourself.
• AI search. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode; the usual fundamentals apply. Independent pages that state your facts consistently are part of what these systems can read.
• Consistency. The same name, description and facts repeated across many sites help readers, and machines, connect them to one company.

What it cannot do

A release is not a ranking shortcut. Copies of the same text on many sites are not many articles about you, Google asks sites to mark paid links so that they are not treated as editorial endorsements, and nobody controls where a page will rank. If a service guarantees first-page rankings or AI mentions from a press release, it is promising something it cannot deliver.

What Google’s rules say about release links

Google’s spam policies give links with optimized anchor text in press releases distributed on other sites as an example of link spam. Its guidance on outbound links asks sites to mark paid or sponsored links with rel="sponsored" (nofollow is also accepted). Since 2019 Google has treated nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints rather than strict instructions. In practice:

• Use your brand name or your plain web address as the link text, not a keyword phrase such as “best running shoes”.
• Link once or twice, to the page the news is about, not to a list of product pages.
• Don’t reuse the same keyword-heavy wording in release after release.

Dofollow and nofollow: what to expect

A dofollow link is an ordinary link. A nofollow or sponsored link carries an attribute asking search engines not to treat it as an endorsement. The site that publishes the release decides which attribute its links carry, not the company that wrote it, so a mix of both is normal, and both kinds can still bring readers to your site.

Vokolla’s Global Reach (US$129), Premium Media (US$379) and Global Impact (US$659) packages carry a mix of dofollow and nofollow links. The DoFollow Links package (US$129) publishes on 100+ news and finance sites where the release’s links are dofollow, and Podcast Reach (US$129) includes many dofollow links from podcast platforms. Links like these can help, but none of them guarantees a ranking, and the link-text advice above applies to every package.

New websites and searches for your brand

For a new website the first job is to be found and indexed: submit a sitemap, verify the site in Search Console and link your own pages to one another. A release that links to the site from established news pages adds another way in.

For an established brand, search your own name the way a stranger would and note what is missing: an independent page about your latest news, a consistent description, an answer to the question buyers ask. Our articles on what shoppers find when they search a brand from abroad and what overseas buyers check before they contact you go through this step by step.

How to measure the effect

Measure against your own starting point:

• In Search Console, compare searches for your brand name and clicks to the pages your releases link to, before and after.
• Check whether the release pages themselves are indexed by searching for the headline in quotation marks.
• Once a month, ask the AI assistants your customers use the same questions about your company, and note which sources they cite.
• Keep every distribution report, so that changes can be matched to dates.

Expect gradual change rather than a jump, and judge a release by whether it put a checkable record in front of the people who matter to you. Our AI search study shows the kind of checking we do ourselves.

Links and packages on Vokolla

Compare the link mix of every package on the pricing page and the outlets on the media list, or start with one free release every 30 days on news sites. The Vokolla AI assistant can draft the release, and every release is reviewed by an editor, including its links, before it is published.