Of the three releases that PR Fire accepted, all three appeared on page one of Google search results for the phrases we searched on. For the runners up, at least one of the releases on those sites appeared on page one. Note: News Wire Today appears to be a copy of PR Zoom, but on a different domain name.

Best free press release site for building links

Given that none of the releases was picked up by any site that might be considered to be the source of a valuable link, it seems that there is little value in using these services for link building. However, some of the sites do provide links and a few allow you to tailor the anchor text. (If you’re not familiar with ‘dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’ links, a good rule of thumb is that the ‘dofollow’ or ‘followed’ links are the kind that usually give some SEO benefit and ‘nofollow’ links generally don’t.) Most sites either didn’t give a link or gave a ‘nofollow’ link.

To get a feel for which sites might be best for links, we could use how highly each press release page ranks in search results as a rough indicator of how much link juice that page might be able to pass. When one of our releases appeared on page one of Google web search (and the free release site provided a link) we rated that site highly for link building (note, this is a very simplistic approach, but good enough to get a feel for the sites; a more detailed analysis might give slightly different results).

Update 21st March 2012: Business Services UK was one of the winners here, but they now charge for their releases (albeit a nominal amount).

Most sites didn’t give followed links

Full list of free press release sites

Note, you may need to scroll right or use the cursor keys after clicking in the list to see the information about followed/nofollowed links.

Should you pay to distribute your press release on a premium news wire?

The answer, as is often the case, is: it depends.

If you’re relying on a free press release distribution service to get your news in front of journalists and bloggers, the odds are that it isn’t going to work except perhaps in a few special cases. If you really must use a wire service, you’d be better served with a premium service. Having said all that, one of the best ways to get journalists interested in your news is traditional PR media relations – find the right journalist, get your story straight and pitch it. We’ve got a series of how-to’s and guides on writing press releases and pitching to the press in our articles on effective press releases^[1].