Why are press release links nofollow?

Because publishers apply it as policy to syndicated content they did not commission. In Google's own terms a nofollow link tells search engines the publisher does not endorse the destination, which is exactly the position a press-release page is in: your copy, on their domain, unreviewed. We read the link attribute off live press-release pages at eleven outlets, and almost none of them passed search credit. That is the product working as designed, not a fault in your announcement.

Buy a press release, get the URLs back, open one, view source, and there it is on every link pointing at your site: rel="nofollow". If you have been told press coverage builds your search authority, that looks like the product failing. It is not. It is what the product is, and it has been for years.

Here is what we actually found when we stopped reading rate cards and started reading HTML.

What eleven outlets published

Between 28 and 29 August 2026 we opened live press-release pages and read the rel attribute off every outbound link in the body — the markup a search engine sees, not a distributor's description of it.

Look again at Digital Journal, OpenPR and AP News. Those three rows are not nofollow; they are worse than nofollow. On OpenPR the client's website appears in the media-contact block as unclickable text. On Digital Journal's ACCESS Newswire format the same. On the AP News copy of a GlobeNewswire release the client's URL does not appear anywhere at all, in any form. There is no link to argue about.

Why publishers do this

A press release is content the newsroom did not commission, did not report and does not stand behind. Publishers say so on the page, in their own words:

Paid press release content from GetNews. The StreetInsider.com news staff was not involved in its creation.

PRESS RELEASE: Paid Content from GlobeNewswire. The AP news staff was not involved in its creation.

This section contains press releases and other materials from third parties (including paid content). The Globe and Mail has not reviewed this content.

Once a publisher has written that sentence, marking the links so they pass no search credit is the consistent next step, not an extra insult. The HTML standard defines nofollow in those exact terms: it indicates that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page, which is the sentence the disclosure above has already made in English. The same policy is why the byline slot on every one of the thirty-plus pages we traced carries a wire's name — "GetNews", "TMX Newsfile", "MarketersMEDIA" — and never a journalist's.

So: most press links are nofollow. That is standard publisher policy for press releases, not a fault in your announcement and not a worse placement than the one you were sold.

What the tag means, and the honest ceiling on it

A link either passes search-engine credit to your site or it does not. The ones that do are called dofollow; the ones that do not are called nofollow. That is the whole distinction, and it is a property of the markup on the page — Google documents the values a publisher can put there in Qualify your outbound links to Google, and added sponsored and ugc alongside nofollow in September 2019.

What it is not is a prediction, and it is not the only value you will meet — the full set of tokens is four wide. Dofollow means the publisher is not blocking search engines from counting the link. It is not a promise that your rankings move. We can read an attribute off a page and tell you exactly what it says; nobody outside a search engine can tell you what that engine then does with it, and anyone selling you the second thing is selling you a guess.

The uncomfortable half

The single outlet in that table with a genuine dofollow link is also the only one with no disclosure at all. TechBullion ran the release as ordinary editorial under a human byline ("By Priya"), and the page contains zero occurrences of "sponsored", "press release", "paid", "advertisement" or "not responsible". The outlets with the blunt, honest labels — Street Insider, AP News, the Globe and Mail — are the ones whose links pass nothing.

Across the whole catalogue we checked, SEO value and disclosure quality run in opposite directions. That is worth knowing before you go shopping for dofollow links on household-name mastheads, because the places that hand them out freely are largely places that do not tell readers the piece was bought.

TechBullion is not even consistent with itself. On a crypto presale release published the same week, the links carried rel="sponsored noopener follow external" — the sponsored token marks a paid link, and a link marked paid is not a credit-passing link whatever else sits beside it. Same outlet, same template, different subject matter, opposite outcome.

One more thing that costs links: duplication

The identical release is published at several URLs on the same day. We watched one ABNewswire submission appear verbatim on Barchart and on Street Insider within hours of each other on 28 August. A search engine picks one canonical copy of duplicated text; the rest are citations rather than ranking assets. "Two placements" was one submission fanning out, which is how the 500-outlet numbers in this industry are built.

So what did you actually buy?

A real, durable, findable URL on a domain people recognise, carrying your announcement in your words. That is worth something specific: a third-party record a journalist, an investor or a customer can find, and a page that keeps resolving. The February release we opened was still live in late August, six months on.

What it is not is a backlink programme. If the pitch you were given was "high-authority dofollow links from national media", the pitch was wrong about the product, not about the industry. Google's spam policies name the practice directly, listing links with optimised anchor text in press releases distributed on other sites among the things it treats as link spam.

Check yours in two minutes

You do not need a tool or a subscription. The longer version of this check is its own article; here is the short one.

1. Open your placement, right-click, and choose View Page Source.
2. Search the source for your own domain.
3. Look at the tag around it. rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" means no credit passes. No rel at all, or a rel containing only things like noopener and noreferrer, means it is a dofollow link — noopener and noreferrer are browser security and privacy settings, defined in the HTML standard in terms of window access and the referrer header, and have nothing to do with search.
4. If you cannot find your domain in the source, there is no link. Check whether it appears as plain text instead. That is a real outcome and it is more common than distributors admit.

What we will not claim about our own measurements

Everything above was read off releases distributed on other companies' rails — ABNewswire, Newsfile, MarketersMedia, GlobeNewswire — not our own. That makes each figure a true observation of that page on that date, and a provisional guide to what your release will get. Outlets change these policies without announcing it, and, as the next article in this series shows, the wire you go out on can change the answer on the same masthead.

That is why our catalogue prints "Unconfirmed" against any outlet whose link setting we have not read off a live page ourselves. We would rather show that than repeat a figure off a rate card.