Do Press Releases Still Get You Backlinks?
Mostly no. A press release gets you links, but Google treats links in a release as placed by the company itself and says it ignores most of them. Buying a release for the backlinks is paying for something Google says it mostly ignores. A release is still worth publishing, for reasons that have nothing to do with link counts.
What Google says
| Source | Date | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Google spam policies, link spam | Page last updated 28 August 2026 | Lists as link spam: "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" |
| Google, qualify your outbound links | Page last updated 10 December 2025 | "Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value." Such links "will generally not be followed" |
| John Mueller, Google, in a webmaster hangout | Reported 29 June 2018 | "We try to ignore links from things like press releases because we know in general companies put the press releases out themselves" |
Google's documentation read on 13 November 2026. The Mueller quote is as transcribed by Search Engine Roundtable.
Sources: Google spam policies, Qualify your outbound links, Search Engine Roundtable.
In the same session Mueller added: "I just wouldn't rely on kind of press releases as a strategy for building up links for a website because like I said we do ignore most of those."
Google is also clear that marked links are fine: "It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value."
Sponsored, nofollow and "regular" links
- rel="sponsored" marks a link that was paid for or placed by the company. Google prefers it for this purpose.
- rel="nofollow" is the older way to say the same thing and is still accepted.
- A link with neither is not a loophole. If it sits in a release the company distributed, Google's stated position is that it tries to ignore it, and keyword-stuffed anchor text can count against the site.
So a "sponsored backlink press release" and a "regular" one end up in the same place for ranking purposes. The first is simply honest about it.
How we mark links on Pressonify
The link from a Pressonify release page to your website carries rel="sponsored". It is there for readers to click, and it follows the rule Google sets for links a company places itself. We do not sell a release as a backlink.
What a press release does get you
- A permanent page that states the news in your words. It is the version a searcher, a journalist or an AI answer can find and quote.
- Structured data about your company. Schema.org markup tells search and AI systems who published the release and what it announces. See whether an AI press release helps or hurts SEO.
- A source for AI answers. Answer engines cite pages. A release published under a verified company domain gives them one to cite, and citation tracking records when they do.
- The chance of earned links. When a journalist or site owner covers the story and links to you by choice, that link counts, because you did not place it. See whether press releases get media coverage.
If you want links, do this instead
- Publish something worth citing: original numbers, a dated price table, a clear answer to a question people ask.
- Tell the people who write about your field, one at a time. Our journalist outreach rules cover how.
- Use the release as the reference page those people link to.
If the choice is between a wire and an agency for this, our service versus agency cost comparison sets out what each charges. And if you have not written the release yet, see whether services write it for you.
Related Reading
- Does an AI Press Release Help or Hurt SEO? Our Tracking Data
- Do Press Releases Get Media Coverage? What Tracking Shows
- Press Release Distribution Pricing Comparison
- Press Release Citation Tracking
Written by the Pressonify team in Dublin. We build the platform described above, publish our own citation data, and correct it in public when it turns out to be wrong.