Today’s guest post is written by John-Henry Scherck.

He apologizes today’s post isn’t very romantic, but he hopes it woos some PR hearts. 

There has been a great deal of chatter in the search community about PR vs. SEO, or how PR campaigns can supplement the link building done by SEO.

The idea that a PR campaign can take the place of an SEO campaign is simply not true.

Having PR and SEO initiatives are great for your business and PR teams can generate tons of links to help boost your rankings. But the links PR produces don’t normally retain value over time.

Don’t get me wrong, I will take a powerful link any day, but when you get a link from a CNN or a HuffPo (or any site that publishes content non-stop) a lot of the value the individual link passes to your site diminishes over time.

Google has made big efforts to let users know their algorithm promotes new content, and recently rolled out a “Freshness Update.” All other factors being equal, links from fresher content are more valuable than links on older posts – especially on websites that publish a lot of content. (more…)