Press Releases in 2010

I'm interviewing for a new head of marketing in my little company and I've heard all sorts of people talk about their marketing expertise.  So far, I'm not all that impressed. I've met some very self-assured people who talk broadly about their expertise and accomplishments in SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate, PR, and so on. But, when I get specific about these areas, I find that there tends to be less solid expertise than just routine experience.  One exception was when I asked one lady about her approach to press releases.

She explained that in addition to having them get picked up by automated aggregators, you need to write them a certain way for them to be used by publications with human editors.  She explained that in the old days, press releases were supposed to provide the fodder for human writers to build an article around. Today, they need to be republishable pretty much with zero editing. So she writes like a journalist, not like she's writing a press release.




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Google leaves China - What does this mean?

In todays news and discussion about Google leaving China, nobody seems to have dug into what that actually means.  Does that mean closing a physical office and laying off some employees? Yes. I saw that in was estimated that $300M in revenue, roughly 1% of Google's revenues, would be lost.  How?

I googled Google China and found, in addition to an official statement by Google, that there is a google.cn which means a Google search engine for China.  I suppose they spider all the .cn domains and provide them as preferred results on searches conducted from .cn sites.

But, if a person in the US using Google.com googles using Chinese characters or another search which is best served by providing a web page in China, will Google still provide them in their results? Or are they going to completely stop spidering anything with the .cn suffix.  Now what about searches that originate inside China but go to Google.com, will they be completed or will they be shut down too?






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Run of site links - Google poison or juice?

It is natural to think that many links would be better than one. But, lets think about that for a second. If you were Google, would you consider a single link from within an article on a website to a site to be a more authoritative vote of confidence than a link to that same site but which is repeated on every page of the site in the same place?

Put differently, from an SEO point of view, what is more valuable, a single link from within a paragraph of text or a run of site link on the bottom of every page.

I feel that Google would prefer the single natural appearing link over the apparently paid-for run-of-site link. But, I also think it's pretty gray.

For instance, think about a blog. Aren't my listing of "blogs I like" on the sidebar, which are run of site links, a significant statement of endorsement?



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