Trackbacks and Press Releases

Today PRWeb officially announced the launch of their support of trackback functionality with press releases. While press releases have traditionally been used to announce news to the media, PRWeb has pioneered a direct to consumer model that allows companies to announce news to a broad audience using PRWeb’s distribution channels.

The addition of trackback functionality creates a link between bloggers and press releases in a way that is not found elsewhere. Now when a blog comments and cites a press release distributed via PRWeb, it can send a trackback to the release, which will in turn create a link back to the blog.

Personally, I am not so sure about the SEO value of such a link exchange, certainly no more or less than what is already happening between thousands of blogs that cite each other every day. What I do believe is that these links will drive more users to content that will be useful to them because of the relevant connections.

For example, a press release about the launch of a new line of elliptical trainers might be written up and linked to from a fitness blog. Doing so will create a trackback link from the press release back to the fitness blog.

A visitor that reads the press release from its distribution on Google News, Yahoo News or any of the thousands of other possible PRWeb distribution points will now be exposed to the fitness blog, which they might not otherwise have found.

Trackbacks to press releases has even made Steve Rubel’s wish list.

“… wouldn’t it be great if press releases had comments, trackbacks and a Technorati in-bound linkmeter actually attached to them?”

My SEO company is already starting to use some of the new PRWeb features and I will post about that here. I would be very interested in comments from other readers about the new PRWeb services.