Whenever a founder forwards us a Google quote about press releases, it is usually the same one, stripped of context and read as a threat. Let us put the whole thing back together.
What Google actually says
Google's link spam guidance names large-scale article marketing and press release campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text as a link scheme. The remedy it prescribes is not "never do PR". It is: mark those links so they do not pass ranking signals.
That is why every serious wire service applies `rel="nofollow"` or `rel="sponsored"` by default. The wires are complying with the guidance, not evading it.
Google's objection has never been to press releases. It is to press releases used as an anchor-text machine.
Nofollow stopped being a wall in 2019
This is the part most articles miss. In September 2019 Google changed nofollow from a strict directive to a hint.
Three attributes exist now, and all three are hints:
- rel="nofollow" — the general "do not associate us with this link" marker.
- rel="sponsored" — paid or compensated placement, which is what most wire links honestly are.
- rel="ugc" — user-generated content such as forum posts and comments.
A hint means Google decides case by case whether to use the link for crawling and ranking. Google said so explicitly when it made the change. So the honest position is: a nofollow press release link may carry some weight, and nobody outside Google can tell you how much for your specific page.
Plan as if it carries none. Be pleased when the data suggests otherwise.
The signals that are not links at all
Attributes only govern link equity. They govern nothing else on the page, and the rest of the page is where the value sits.
- Entity building. Your brand name, founder name, product and category appear together on domains Google trusts. That is how a company becomes a recognised entity rather than an unknown string.
- Unlinked and branded mentions. Consistent naming across many credible sources is exactly the corroboration that knowledge panels, AI overviews and LLM answers are assembled from.
- Discovery. Journalists, aggregators and niche blogs read the wires. The follow-on coverage that results is editorial, and those links carry no attribute problem at all.
- Conversion. A prospect searching your name and finding AP News, Yahoo Finance press release backlinks and Business Insider press release backlinks behaves differently to one who finds nothing.
What actually gets people in trouble
In our experience the penalties and deindexing we see traced back to press releases share a short list of causes:
- Exact-match commercial anchors repeated across hundreds of syndicated copies.
- Five or six links crammed into 300 words of thin, spun copy.
- The identical release blasted to every network every week, so the whole footprint is duplicate content.
- Networks of expired or auto-generated "news" domains sold as premium distribution.
None of those are a press release problem. They are a discipline problem.
How we run releases inside the guidance
- Write news. A real announcement, a named spokesperson, a quote that says something.
- Keep anchors natural — brand name, bare URL, or a plain descriptive phrase. Save exact-match for links you earn.
- Two links beats five. One commercial target, one supporting authority page.
- Vary the copy between distributions instead of stamping one text across every outlet.
- Treat dofollow placements as the smaller, deliberate slice of the profile, not the whole thing.
The practical takeaway
Google's stance is a labelling requirement, not a ban. Follow the labelling, write like a newsroom would, and press releases remain one of the cheapest ways to put your brand on high-authority domains — with ranking upside that is real but should never be the whole plan.
Every listing we sell states its attribute up front for exactly this reason, and the press release backlink FAQs cover the rest. Samples and the outlets we do not list publicly are in the client dashboard.