TrustRank May Cleanup Press Release Optimization Spam

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Apr 29th, 2005 in Online Marketing

Slashdot posts a link to an article on NewScientist.com regarding a Google patent that has garnered so much attention in the SEO world. The article describes how Google will use a variety of factors to determine the quality of news sources to rank news stories rather than the current method of date posted and keyword relevancy.

“The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.”

Press release optimization relies on using search engine optimization tactics to structure a press release with desired keywords and distributing through a wire service for inclusion on news search engines. Most notably, to Google News and Yahoo News.

Unfortunately, several “Free” newswire services accept a large amount of SEO spam as press releases. If those services do not improve their editorial reviews, (or add them) then Google’s efforts will likely have a notable effect on their distribution on Google News. It remains to be seen whether TrustRank will really improve relevancy and user experience for Google News search, but we’ll be watching.

Tags: TrustRank, Google News