PR by SEO

Wow! I thought ‘black hat’ went out in 2006?

Evidently not.

Admittedly anyone spamming me saying “buckeroo’s” I would be very cautious of…

Guanteed Google News – yawn…

Can I just say that Leila at Newsmaker offers a great service – am quite surprised that they have gone down the group buy route – certainly doesn’t stand their service in the light that I would normally associate it in.

/y0z

Claiming page 1 rankings is quite simply foolish. Nobody can guarantee page one rankings.

I know Leila Henderson and I know Newsmaker. I have used Leila’s PR service for several years, and I monitor submissions closely. Not one press release I’ve submitted has failed to appear in Google news OR organic search – and often, they appear in Google news within seconds of being made live on Newsmaker.

Newsmaker is a quality service, and that is due to Leila’s diligence in that she screens submissions very carefully to keep out the flotsam and jetsam (spammers and poor quality submissions).

My clients have received very positive responses from Newsmaker posts, including the latest one I posted a few days ago for a mate about Ted Mulry’s memorial unveiling. Several radio interview requests were received from large and small networks within an hour of posting, AND the PR itself is on page one in Google organic for simply “Ted Mulry”.

Other press releases I’ve posted previously still remain high in Google SERPs long after posting.

As for the Antmart (Anthill) offer, Leila would NOT have authorised the use of claims such as “immediate Google listings”, even though MY experience shows that Newsmaker is indeed held in high regard by Google. Everything else is essentially true.

That said, my opinion is that this offer is great value for any business who has something to say – even without any SEO involved, 97 bucks for UNLIMTED press releases for ONE whole month is pretty good value.

As publisher of Anthill (and now Antmart too), I’d like to offer my two buckeroos worth.

What you see here is an example of mumbrella-esque journalism in its purest form. I’m not talking about this article. I’m talking about this promo, courtesy of Antmart’s copywriters. We’ve grabbed the most sensationalist aspect of the service and made that the lead. Did it work? (Well, you’re still reading aren’t you?) 

Now, if you want to know more, why not visit Antmart. You’ll see that NewsMaker’s main service is news release distribution — the ‘old fashioned way’ via email (where mumbrella goes to find its press releases). And it’s bloody good. Sure, we’d all like to spend hours cultivating Tim’s official mumbrella address, his gmail address, his  twitter handle (or should we  ping you via Facebook?)… but who  has the time?

I’m personally too busy coming up with words for… cashola, dough, spindoola, dineros, coin, largent… okay… I’m spent.

It’s 2011 —  Google sets the rules. If you want PageRank  you follow those rules. NewsMaker is a smart, ethical business that  provides a great service. Black hat? Seriously? These are the  rules that  big marketers  use. Shouldn’t smaller  or time constrained business also  be able to apply  those rules?

/y0z — Thank you for supporting a thoughtful and forward-thinking business owner (the good peeps at NewsMaker even manually correct spelling in their client press releases… they are THAT thorough) but to suggest that ‘going down the group buying route’ somehow dimishes the brand would be like saying… in 1999… that putting an ad on SEEK is a move fraught with danger. (“Classifieds on the Internet! Outrageous!”) 

Seriously, group buying works extremely well for disruptive brands (that need a small amount of explanation) and businesses that operate on repeat sales. It’s just another form of marketing that mumbrella readers would be wise to get their head around.

Thanks for exposure. Now I must go. Count my not-so-filthy lucre.

Great response James.

However, and I wouldn’t want to undermine the thoroughness of you and your staff, your website is mis-spelt in your link. It should be http://www.anthillonline.com .

You sold me with your response, but then a #fail when I went to take the next step 🙂

There are many other products and services that think and work differently to Mumbrella, so bagging this methodology based on one mode of thinking seems petty and arrogant to me. There’s a world outside of ours here in advertising and media-land.

I wonder if ‘Mumbrellaesque’ is beginning to be the vernacular for bitchy?

There should be more Anthills – and mumbrellas, to be fair – with the balls to challenge the status quo. When James approached me, I thought why not give it a go – it’s the equivalent of offering a free trial or discount, which is the usual model for introducing online services. I have to hand it to James for pushing the envelope with his copy, even though he took a little artistic licence with this one and I don’t make Page 1 claims for reasons explained clearly above.
Cheers – and thanks for the positive comments,
Leila

I was searching for mumbrella jobs the other day, I left off the .au and got redirected to CareerOne.

Click: http://mumbrella.com/jobs

This is a News Digital tie-up or dodgy SEO?

Leila / James

what concerns me about your ad, and the general advertising of your service is that it proclaims that for what is a small fee that you will get in front of “1000s of Media Contacts” and as your site says “NewsMaker’s Press Release Service gives you more media coverage….”

I know that you are using media coverage to mean online media (through search results) but the message to non PR/marketing/advertising people that this service is promoted to, is that paying a token fee and sending out a release to thousands of contacts will get you media coverage in the traditional press. It doesn’t and it won’t.

Yes you might be able to get Page 1 search engine rankings, for some specific keywords, that’s not media coverage, that’s Search Engine Optimisation.

Advertising yourself as a PR service flies in the face of the hard work that good PR people (note that I said good) do in properly researching their media contacts and targeting pitches to journalists. It is also an insult to the journalists who are on your lists that they can be targeted with a group email of “1000s of contacts in Australia and New Zealand” and get a story published.

If you knew anything about PR you would know that it takes a lot more more than pressing the send button on a group email to get a proper story in the news, whether it be in a traditional paper, on radio or in front of a blogger.

@”Dave” Thank you very much for letting us know about the poor quality of Newsmaker, and how their press releases do not get to off line media (TV, radio, print).

It will certainly come as a great shock to all the people who have had calls for radio interviews, TV news interest, and newspaper articles as a result of press releases I’ve submitted through NM.

Thank you also for enlightening us as to Leila’s lack of experience and expertise in public relations. This will come as a BIG surprise to everyone who has known Leila throughout her long and successful PR and Journalism career.

Perhaps you might enlighten us further with YOUR career highlights – I mean, besides posting anonymous and disparaging remarks about a respected and experienced member of the public relations community.

Do you reckon that lovely Chinese ISP do it for a laugh? Or do you think someone is getting paid, somewhere, for reffering uniques to Caeerone? And would an ABC audit count this as valid traffic?

If a website is paying to get redirected traffic from another website brand then it would be a breach of ABA rules to count it, because websites can only count traffic that is user-requested. If a user didn’t intend (request) to go to a certain website then it shouldn’t be counted towards that website’s market figures. Due to recent rules changes it’s also a breach to serve ads on these non-user requested pages.

In this case it looks like the Careerone website is sitting in a frame below the masthead, while a user is still on http://mumbrella.com/jobs. The referrer code in the careerone frame’s URL is adlux, so maybe this is a part of a wider ad network buy.

We have recently detected 5 other local websites similarly in breach of this rule. In addition to buying redirects from dead domains, they have also been popping up their site off the back of another 3rd party site in order to leech extra another site’s traffic towards their figures or using interstitials to do the same thing.

These issues have now been resolved (for the 5 sites we know about). We can only verify this for certain on sites that are audited, so beware of sites that don’t have the green tick! To be certain, check who’s on the Safe List: http://www.auditbureau.org.au/webauditmembers.php