Here’s a thing- why is it OK to publish a PR piece on your site as well as submitting it to PR sites, but it’s not OK to publish article content that you’ve submitted to article sites?
They appear to be so similar as to be almost the same thing, so why would the search engines potentially penalise you for one and not the other? One key distinction is their intent.
Here are the main factors:
PR is clearly self promotion- everyone knows this so when you choose to publish on a PR site the engines know that the content is unique to the referenced organisation or brand- they know that you’re not being a dirty spammer, they know that PR sites host content that can be found easily elsewhere, and that there is no attempt being made to game them.
Online PR pieces usually only use a homepage URL to link back to a site, rather than pointing to a specific page using keyword anchor text- there is no attempt to gain any reall SEO leverage.
PR pieces are not intented to be available for re-use by other sites- there is an implied creative-commons rule, and anyway, what real use is someone elses PR to someone looking for content?
To quote Pete “Usually the biggest difference between article and PR content is that PR mentions a company by name, to make an announcement of some sort about the company, whereas an article looks at concepts, or themes, without any self promotion- it also links back to the website with SEO link anchors”.
Another factor is that PR pieces are often available on the originator site in a dedicated company news/PRdirectory, rather than forming part of overall site content. This makes them harder to find in regular search, unless you are specifically searching for a “news” piece.
