I am aware that people sometimes use the terms PR and marketing interchangeable, and at least in the very olden days when I worked for a PR company - and later when I did outreach in academia - we cared about SEO too. Having said that, I did deliberately not use the term "PR" in my original post as I do see it as very different from what the companies do who send us and other bloggers these emails. From the fact that we don't have adds etc. on this blog but that we have accepted invitations from PR before (and will continue to do so) you can come to a conclusion about where we stand on this.
There are also issues to discuss about the more subtle dynamics between PR and press, but this is really not what I was after. For me PR has nothing to do with buying links and/or content in the way I described.
What I am concerned about is the practice of buying links disguised with so called "unique content". This can be pure SEO or also involve disguising what should be an advert as original site content. We were approached with content that was clearly about selling a specific product through fake reviews and not just placing a link with the right keyword, so for me it goes beyond SEO.
Wine PR is not what I was getting at
I am aware that people sometimes use the terms PR and marketing interchangeable, and at least in the very olden days when I worked for a PR company - and later when I did outreach in academia - we cared about SEO too. Having said that, I did deliberately not use the term "PR" in my original post as I do see it as very different from what the companies do who send us and other bloggers these emails. From the fact that we don't have adds etc. on this blog but that we have accepted invitations from PR before (and will continue to do so) you can come to a conclusion about where we stand on this.
There are also issues to discuss about the more subtle dynamics between PR and press, but this is really not what I was after. For me PR has nothing to do with buying links and/or content in the way I described.
What I am concerned about is the practice of buying links disguised with so called "unique content". This can be pure SEO or also involve disguising what should be an advert as original site content. We were approached with content that was clearly about selling a specific product through fake reviews and not just placing a link with the right keyword, so for me it goes beyond SEO.