Note: the sharp-eyed might spot that some of these tests are liable to error, but we think they give a good idea of the value of each site (one possible issue, for example, was the risk of duplicate content factors affecting how Google dealt with each copy of a given release).

A note about press releases being accepted for ‘publication’ by the sites: we have (as you might expect) a lot of experience writing press releases that meet the rules laid down by various news wire services (e.g. don’t make claims about being the ‘best’ something unless you can prove it). However, not all of the sites accepted our releases, this may be because they didn’t meet the site’s editorial guidelines or for some other reason – why some sites rejected our press releases isn’t at all clear.

See below to find out what we discovered in our tests – your experience with these sites may be different of course, if so let us know in the comments.

Best free press release site for reaching journalists, bloggers, editors and other influencers

To be fair, we did expect this result, it is rare enough for someone to pick up news from some of the premium paid-for news wires and given the volume of free press releases being pumped out these days we would have been (pleasantly) surprised to find any pick up of our releases. When we did find a release that had been syndicated out to other sites none of those other sites came across as ‘high quality’, they were invariably loaded down with banner and AdSense advertising.

BTW, if you own or manage one of the sites we reviewed and think we’ve missed something, drop us a line and we’ll add your feedback or make sure we look out for it next time we run the review.

Best free press release site for Google News

Online PR News got three of our four releases on Google News. PR Fire only got one release onto Google News while Open PR got two of them there.

Best free press release site for appearing in Google web searches

Appearing in web searches may be valuable as a way of trying to put your news in front of people searching for your target phrases – though it is unlikely this will be effective where the target phrases are more than moderately competitive.