I am interested in the thoughts of those of you that have a better handle on this than I do... which is everyone. One of my sites has a lot of pages with information about large companies and I have a bunch of unique content on them... stuff I wrote myself. I'm on the first page of google for many different keywords but am on the second and third on others. If I put press releases on my sites pertaining to the companies or even put out by the companies, would that help or hurt? I don't want to fill my pages with duplicate content if it's going to hurt obviously but a press release is meant to be spread about. If you could offer some information about this, I would appreciate it.
You can place a Pr on your website, as long as you link to the original post it will not harm your website
I agree with choice here. To be more safe add short snippets with your own views/ counter views and a link to original post will work more.[IMO] It's all about how you present stuffs to your readers and how much time you invest improving contents of your website.
Putting press releases on your site that were published by the companies that your pages are talking about is NOT likely going to do anything to help your rankings. It's likely only going to serve to help those company's own pages rank because the press releases likely have links in them back to the company. That's why a lot of companies issue press releases - to get backlinks. Merely placing a duplicate press release on an existing page on your site is not going to help. The text from the release will be known to be duplicate by Google so you are really not going to get any benefit from the content. All ranking factors dependent on the content of your page will be devalued. So the rankings of that page will again pretty much be totally dependent on inbound links... Why not just build more links to your existing pages with unique content rather than having to work even harder to build even MORE links to a page that contains duplicate content to compensate for the dup content having been devalued?
Yes better just add a short intro and link to the original. Or even better write your own summary and take on the original article. Original content can create wonders for your website.
Putting press releases on your site will not help that is for sure. Giorgioarmani's solution is the best one. You can create unique content that tells your visitors about the press release and you add a link to that press release.
Two points from your post. Google will not se it as duplicate as your linking back to the original content. And the Pr company will not benefit from placing the pr on your own website if you use No-Follow links to link back.
I build links daily as well via building new blogs and using ezine as well. My typical day is no less than 5 ezine articles and no less than 6 new blogs daily on web 2.0 properties. I appreciate all the help that all of you have offered in this thread.
@Choice Google WILL see it as duplicate content. Do you REALLY think Google is going to say, "Oh... Give Joe's website full credit for this press release for company X as if they had written it themselves because they linked back to company X?". No they will not. Having the link back to the original press release on Company X's site only helps Google determine which version of the content is the original. That is why Cutts suggests that you include a link back to the original press release on your own site in any press release. One version of the press release will get dubbed "the original" and ALL others will get dubbed "Duplicate". As such the URLs where the duplicate versions are located have a little harder time ranking for those same keywords as the original because the content on the duplicate pages have been devalued. The original is given an edge in being able to rank for its targeted keywords... Google's way of rewarding them for generating unique content. The duplicate(s) can still out rank the original, but they have to compensate for the poor scores on the content-based ranking factors by getting higher scores on other ranking factors like possibly getting more backlinks. And not sure what the PR company has to do with it. I didn't mention any PR company. We publish Press Releases all the time through PRWeb and lots of other online companies. We never link to the PR company on our press release. Not sure really what you're talking about in your second point.