This past Friday at midnight, we rolled out a brand new PRWeb.com.  This launch was the result of countless hours of effort logged by a wide variety of individuals – from developers, to designers, to writers and more, this was truly a collaborative effort that spanned the company.

Also worth noting is that the launch is a mashup of several different projects that have been on our roadmap for a while now.  Some changes will be immediately obvious, such as the updated look and feel of the site and the new press release template.  Other changes on the other hand, will reveal their impact over time – but more on this in a bit.  What is common throughout all the updates is our intention to better serve our customers – from providing them with more tools to get started to ensuring that the releases perform more effectively online, this launch was all about continuing to offer industry leading visibility to our customers.

As with all significant changes, there are sure to be questions that arise.  We want to take this opportunity to address some of the more significant changes you may notice with the new PRWeb.com:

1. We are no longer listing all $140+ releases on the home page

Back when PRWeb was a free service and publishing a far more limited volume of releases, front page placement was a benefit granted to certain customers willing to make a financial contribution to the company.  At this time there were more tangible benefits to front page placement in terms of readership and SEO.  Over time, the volume of releases published daily has swelled to a much larger number and we have ended up with a home page that can contain too many articles at times.  This has made the home page less than optimal for both users as well as search engines.

Our solution to this challenge has been to evolve from an architecture that focuses on one front page to one that has multiple front pages (from a search perspective). Tactically, we have done this by creating a section of our domain completely devoted to customer news releases, organized around industry verticals (i.e. arts & entertainment, technology, etc.).  This technique is one that is used by many sites with a large volume of content and is a generally accepted method for creating value in certain silos within the hierarchy of a Web site and passing value to the pages located within these silos (customer news releases).

As a result, we fully expect this new architecture to increase the volume of traffic to your release as well as your site.

2. We have made some major changes to the news release template

The PRWeb news release has undergone some significant changes.

First, you’ll notice that there is far more room being given to multimedia elements like video, images, and file attachments.  In the last several years we have gained a lot of empirical knowledge about the way that people consume news online.  Our own research into the effects of multimedia on news consumption showed that the presence of relevant images and video increased the average time users spent on news releases.  There is also notable research that has proven the correlation between multimedia and action.

Then again, all it takes is a quick look at the home page of CNN.com to see how multimedia is beginning to dominate the visual real estate of news sites today.

The second major change we have made is to place links to various actions such as sharing, further inline with the news content.  These days, news releases are not just about getting people to read a story; they are also about getting the reader to take some form of measurable action: to share on Facebook, e-mail to friends, and more.  Subsequently, we have optimized the placement of these links to make our news more action-able.

The final change we’ve made to the release is behind the scenes.  After years of adding code, the time had come for us to step back and optimize the code behind the release to make sure it was optimized for faster load times and better performance in search.  Speed is not only important for users, but leading certain search engines have been very vocal about the growing importance of speed when it comes to performance in search.

3.  We have introduced a dedicated learning center

Over the past few years, we have been consistently investing more time and resources into customer education.  We realize that although there are some folks who have been sending out press releases for years, the practice of creating and distributing online news releases is still relatively new.

What’s more, the varying backgrounds of our customers has created a need for a range of different types of content.  We have PR folks who want to learn more about SEO, and SEO folks who want to learn more about PR.  We have small business owners who want to move from sending out one release each year, to a more ongoing cycle of communication that results in the long term development of online visibility for their brand and their business.

So in response to the ongoing demand for educational resources, we are launching a dedicated learning center that will serve as a hub for all the various articles, webinars, and white papers we have put together.

Hopefully these points address some of the more glaring questions you might have.  If you have others (and I’m sure some of you will), please post them to the comments section of this article and we will make sure to address them as quickly as possible.

We’re looking forward to the conversation.

Introducing the New PRWeb Web site was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Note (7/1 @ 5:02 PM ET) - As of 12AM this morning, the situation has been resolved.  Thanks to both the teams at McAfee as well as Yahoo! for helping us rectify the situation in an efficient manner.

In the past day, some customers may have noticed the PRWeb hosted version of their news release showing up in the Yahoo! search results with a flag indicating that there may be harmful downloads associated with their news release URL.

This flag is the result of a new beta feature that Yahoo! has released, in conjunction with McAfee, to screen their search results for harmful or malicious sites.  A closer look at the the detailed McAfee profile in the drill down clearly states that there “aren’t any significant problems” with PRWeb.com or with any of the releases hosted on the site.

In researching the matter, we have observed an indication that one file on PRWeb.com has been flagged in the McAfee report although the individual file doesn’t impact our overall site’s rating.  This file was an attachment from a release originally distributed in 2003.  We have reviewed that file and determined it to be safe and also freely available for download from several free download sites.  It was mistakenly diagnosed and flagged by McAfee and we believe this may be contributing to the Yahoo! search results flag.  As a precaution we have removed this file down from the PRWeb server.

We are currently in the process of reaching out to both Yahoo! and McAfee and expect a swift resolution to this issue.

Update 7/29 @ 12:31 PM (ET) – We have received the following response from Yahoo!

I understand that you have concerns regarding a “Dangerous Downloads” warning listed on your site in the Yahoo! Search Results.  I would like to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Yahoo! SearchScan is powered by McAfee.  McAfee provides safety data within Yahoo! Search results to indicate potentially harmful websites.   If your domain shows a warning that you disagree with, it is important that you contact McAfee directly, so they can provide an analysis of your domain.

In fact, we did contact McAfee as soon as we saw the issue and have received the following:

This site (prweb.com) has been queued for a full retest.  Please note that any change (if warranted) may take up to 8 weeks to reflect.  We thank you for your continued patience.

Rest assured, we are not satisfied with these answers and are continuing to move forward to get this situation resolved as quickly as possible.

Update 7/29 @ 4:09 PM (ET) – We have received a direct response from direct contacts at both McAfee as well as Yahoo! and they have both mentioned they will investigate the situation in more depth however no direct actions as of yet.

Update 7/29 @ 5:29 PM (ET) – We have been in ongoing communications with McAfee, who have been very active in working with us to resolve the issue.  They have reportedly updated their records.  It may take a little while to circulate through their system.  They are also reaching out to Yahoo! to see if the Yahoo! data can be refreshed.

Update 7/30 @ 10:21 AM (ET) - We made more inroads with the Yahoo! Web search team last night.  They are fully aware of the situation and looking into solutions.  Also received notification from the team who originally contacted me over at McAfee, saying it was being escalated, however I think the McAfee team has already updated the data and is doing everything they can to reach out to Yahoo!   Meanwhile, Online Media Daily has published a story on the ongoing situation.  Hoping for a resolution by the end of today.  Even if all the data is updated on the Yahoo! side, I would think it would take a while to work it’s way through their vast system.

Update 7/30 @ 3:43 PM (ET) – The Yahoo! Web search team has been able to remove the flag from some of our results.  For example, the main top-level domain PRWeb.com is no longer showing the warning sign however there are other URL(s) that continue to show the warnings including several of our sub-domains.  The Yahoo! team is continuing to work to clear out the remainder of the warning signs.

Update 8/1 @ 4:32 PM (ET) - As of 12:39 AM (ET) this morning, Yahoo! reported all search results have been successfully updated.  Thanks to both the McAfee and Yahoo! teams for mobilizing and helping us achieve resolution to this situation!

Inaccurate McAfee Message on PRWeb Results in the Yahoo! Search Engine was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

At PRWeb, we review and distribute hundreds of releases on a daily basis to countless bloggers, journalists and Web sites.  If we sent every piece of content to every single member of our audience we’d quickly overwhelm them with and it wouldn’t be long until we saw our news recipients opting-out.  In order to ensure that we get the right customer news releases to the right targets, we use regional and topical category schemes.

Whenever a PRWeb user uploads a news release, they are prompted to choose certain topics and regions that are relevant to their news release.  These selections are reviewed by our editor before the release is published.  At the same time, when users sign-up to receive news content via RSS or e-mail, or publishers sign-up to become syndication partners, they make decisions about what regions and topics they are interested in receiving news releases on.

Ultimately, the topical and regional selections are largely what determine the specific bloggers, journalists and Web publishers who receive our customer news releases.

Targeting Specific Regions and Topics with PRWeb was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

It is pretty common in our industry to talk about about getting your news release to Google, Bing or Yahoo! but what does this actually mean?

First off, it’s important to note that no one (despite what you may be told) can guarantee very much when it comes to the search engines.  However, what we are capable of doing is studying the various methods for getting news releases into search engines and work with customers to provide them with the best opportunity to get the most traffic from the countless people using search engines to find news and information.

That being said, one of the keys to defining what it means to “get your news release to a search engine” involves distinguishing between the standard Web search engine and the news search engine.  The Web engine shows a wide variety of content – from images, to video, to news and more.  The Web engine is what most people use when they visit Bing, Google or Yahoo!

If your web site is already getting indexed by a search engine, then getting your news release into these engines can be as simple as uploading it onto your Web site where the search engine crawlers can get to it.   If you want to increase the likelihood that a search engine will pick-up your news release you can submit a sitemap file to the search engines that includes the URL of your news release.

However, just because a search engine finds and indexes your news release doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is going to see it.  Getting a news release into a search engine is the easy part – getting it into a search engine so people will see it is the tricky part.  This depends on a number of variables but essentially boils down to A) How you have constructed your news release and B) The authority of your site.  Best practices for news release optimization is a pretty big discussion that we’ll have to save for another day.

Moving on, the other type of search that matters for news releases is news search.  News search is a different section of Bing, Yahoo! and Google than the standard Web search engine.  Another key difference that only related to Yahoo! is that they not only provide an engine for retrieving news but they also generate original, editorial content.

When it comes to getting into news search, the search engines are more selective about determining what gets in.  They distinguish between certified “news sources,” that can include outlets like the AP and Reuters and news distribution services like PRWeb.  Content from these certified news sources will be indexed and retrieved when searches are run in the news search engines.  Even if you use a certified news source to carry your news release, there are still various factors that may prevent your particular news release from getting indexed.  Google, for example, has a list of news-specific crawl errors that may prevent your news release from getting into Google News.  However, once it does get in, your news release will be typically indexed for a 28-day period.

Getting your News Release into Google, Bing and Yahoo! was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

When PRWeb was still a fledgling start-up operating on a freemium model, we decided to offer placement on the PRWeb.com home page as an enticement to upgrade the value of a release. At this point in time, there was a far smaller volume of news releases being published each day and front page placement offered some tangible benefits to customers. For one, visitors to PRWeb.com looking to consume content were more likely to see the release if it was on the front page. Secondly, we believed that placing the release on the home page meant that the crawlers would get to it faster, increasing the rate at which the release would be indexed in search. So for one day, the customer’s news release would be hosted on the front page and subsequently relegated to deeper pages within the site.

Over time, the volume of news releases published through PRWeb has grown dramatically and the front-page approach has grown problematic from both a news consumer perspective (who wants to scroll through over a hundred news releases on a page) and from a search crawler perspective. The time has come to implement a site architecture that is more suited to the flow of content that is passes through PRWeb on a daily basis.

In re-architecting the section of the site devoted to customer news releases, we were driven by the following goals:

• To ensure optimal visibility for customer news releases – We believe that the primary benefit we provide to our customers is the visibility we are able to generate for them through their news releases. The majority of traffic that comes to PRWeb news releases is from search engines and we made sure to design a site architecture that would first and foremost, be focused on ensuring our customer news releases be easily found and indexed by search engines.
• To provide an optimal experience for news consumers – A secondary focus of ours was improving the general user experience for news consumers, which in turn translates to increased traffic for customers.
• To create a dedicated destination for customer content – For a long time, PRWeb.com has served the dual purpose of educating customers and prospects as well as being the distribution point for customer content. The new architecture will ensure an appropriate segmentation of these two types of content, which will provide us with considerably more flexibility to mold the architecture to solely focus on improving the visibility of customer content.
• To introduce content scalability – We wanted to ensure that the framework we designed and implemented would not only be able to support the hundreds of releases we are publishing on a daily basis today, but the thousands of releases we expect to be publishing daily in the future.

The news center we will be launching over the next month will be oriented towards the fulfillment of the above, stated goals. In addition to some aesthetic changes, you will also see an architecture that is more organized around verticals (i.e. business, finance, technology, etc.) and pages that have a more manageable array of stories.

We fully expect the new architecture will increase the visibility of customer content in search and also drive more traffic to both their PRWeb news releases as well as their own Web sites. As always, we’re happy to get your feedback in the comments section of this blog.

A Sneak Preview of the PRWeb News Center was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Over the next few weeks you will see some modifications to the actual news release template being rolled out. These modifications are aimed at accomplishing several important goals including.  Top-level goals include A) Improving the experience for those reading and interacting with the news release, and B) Improving the search friendliness of the news releases.

The modifications to the news release editing tool are minor but don’t be surprised if we have introduced a few tweaks.  When we roll the new template out we’ll be providing a much broader, comprehensive explanation of the launch.

Upcoming Changes to the News Release Template was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

This morning we announced an exciting, new partnership with Zemanta, aimed at enhancing the reach of our customer news releases into the blogosphere.

I like to think about Zemanta as an Associated Press for bloggers.  They basically are a resource that provides contextually relevant content for bloggers while they are writing their stories.  Through our partnership, our customer news releases will be included in the aggregate of content that Zemanta presents to bloggers while they write.

Simply put, it is a simple and easy way for people to get their news releases to the blogosphere without having to worry about any potential negative impact.

PRWeb news releases already receive the most traction of any other news distribution service out there.  A quick search of Google for the volume of blogs linking to our site reveals over .5 million results – no one else compares.  This partnership should push us even further ahead.

PRWeb Partners with Zemanta to Enhance Visibility of News Releases in Blogosphere was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

We have recently finalized several new syndication partnerships with leading Web sites including:

• Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) Web Properties – The leading trade association for multi-channel marketers. PRWeb news releases will appear on their website, blog and online trade magazine.
• Website Magazine – Website Magazine offers website professionals information on how to succeed on the web. Reaching 135,669 qualified professionals, the publication has the largest audience of website owners and managers in the field.  Our news releases will appear on their main Web site.
• Acquire Media – Acquire Media specializes in news aggregation and real-time distribution for financial organizations, corporate enterprises, web portals, and publishers.

New Syndication Agreements was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

We’re pleased to introduce a significant addition to our industry-leading distribution network, Comtex. Comtex aggregates content from premium news providers like PRWeb and then makes that content available to a broad array of top-tier publishers.

We have already seen many customer news releases appearing on top Web sites through the partnership and expect to see many more in the days to come!

Read the full release.

PRWeb to Distribute News to the Comtex News Network was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

PRWeb was the pioneer in using RSS to distribute news releases and our RSS network is the oldest, largest and most highly trafficked in the industry.  Using RSS we accomplish two goals: One, we get news releases to news consumers (people who want to read the news).  Two, we get news releases to publishers (people who want to publish the news).

We’ve recently taken a closer look at the volume of traffic we receive to our RSS network.  Our most recent data indicates:

• RSS Consumer Reach: In a typical week, our network receives over 3 million requests from over 250,000 subscribers around the world.  These are consumers, bloggers, journalists, analysts, etc. who want to receive our news.
• RSS Publisher Reach: In a typical week, our network receives requests from over 30,000 Web publishers who publish our RSS feeds on their Web sites.

Updated PRWeb RSS Statistics was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com