60 free press release sites tested – a detailed review

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].

Some other notes to bear in mind:

• Most releases seem to take a few days to go live on the sites, though sometimes a release would go live straight away – there seemed to be no discernible pattern to the timing
• Some of the free services have (modestly priced) upgrades like giving you links or long term archiving of your releases
• At least one of the sites caused our A/V software to raise a warning about possible malware
• We used our first release as a test to get a feel for the sites, having formed an opinion (and to avoid wasting time on sites that didn’t meet our goasl), we carried out subsequent tests on the top twenty or so sites.
• Please note that registering with free PR distribution sites will inevitably mean you start to receive SPAM emails so, to avoid this, we recommend setting up an alternative email address and using this to register with these sites

If there are sites you think we need to include in our review, please let us know using this form^[2] we’ll try to include them in the next update. If you’ve anything to else to add, please let us know in the comments below.

Update: if you’re interested in our thoughts on paid-for news wire sites, check out our mini-review of paid-for press release distribution services^[3], alternatively read our survey about how and why journalists use press release distribution services^[4].

Also, if you want to submit free news to a technology website covering Midlands companies, please head over to Techsparx.co.uk^[5].

Finally, if you found this research interesting or useful, please consider liking or tweeting etc. all those buttons are at the top of the page^[6].

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