As you may remember, Google Panda 4.0 had a major negative impact on many press release sites including the largest one, PR Newswire. In response, PR Newswire issued a press release about them cracking down on "spammers" by removing and "taking action" on low quality press releases both before they hit the feeds and going back and removing a lot of the spammy older press releases.
PR Newswire, according to SearchMetrics, saw a huge dive in "SEO Visibility" after Panda 4.0.
What are their new guidelines that will fix this? They include:
- Inclusion of insightful analysis and original content (e.g. research, reporting or other interesting and useful information);
- Use of varied release formats, guarding against repeated use of templated copy (except boilerplate);
- Assessing release length, guarding against issue of very short, unsubstantial messages that are mere vehicles for links;
- Overuse of keywords and/or links within the message.
Of course, you got to love this quote:
"Google's recent algorithm update is essentially a technology-based editorial guideline for content quality, and PR Newswire is aligning our processes with those standards to ensure that press releases distributed are high-quality, authenticated content," noted Jason Edelboim, senior vice president of global product for PR Newswire. "Google's recent action targeting low-quality content in the Panda 4.0 update affirms the importance of ensuring press releases and other content distributed via PR Newswire's network are of real utility and interest to journalists and bloggers, as well as the general public."
If only they took these steps before Google slapped them. If only.
I assume this is having a major impact on their business both the traffic drop and now preventing a whole segment of spammers customers from paying them for press releases.
Forum discussion at Google+.
