Every outbound client link ships rel="sponsored nofollow". There is no dofollow tier.
Not at any price. Not on any tier. Not for agencies, not for long-term clients, not as an undocumented favour. This is enforced by the publishing template rather than by anyone remembering to apply it, because a policy that depends on memory is not a policy.
Why
Google’s link spam policy explicitly names, as an example of an unnatural link, “links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.” Mass-syndicated dofollow links with exact-match anchors are a link scheme, and link schemes carry manual action risk.
The correct attribution for paid placement is rel="nofollow" or
rel="sponsored". We apply both.
Sourced Google Search Central, link spam policy. See also reporting on Google’s position and a summary of the policy.
The self-interested reason, stated plainly
We would rather be honest about this than pretend it is purely principle. Our whole product is an editor at a real publication choosing to cover you. A publication that catches us passing paid links as editorial never runs our pitch again, for you or for any client after you. The policy protects the asset we sell.
A dofollow tier would earn a little more per release and destroy the asset that makes any release worth buying. That is not a difficult trade-off. It only looks like one from outside.
What we found when we looked at the rest of the category
In September 2026 we read the live pages of eighteen press release providers, global and Indian, looking specifically for a stated link-attribution policy.
| Finding | Detail |
|---|---|
| No incumbent wire published a link policy | Not one of the twelve incumbents stated, on any page we reached, whether their links are dofollow, nofollow or sponsored. |
| Two providers globally state one | And one of them states it negatively. |
| The negative statement | DigitalPressRelease.in discloses backlinks as “0–2 (Mixed)” and notes “Some may use no-follow attributes… Some may remove links entirely.” Uncomfortable, and more honest than silence. |
| The most honest product name in the category | Advice4Media sells a tier literally named “Non Indexed Press Release” at ₹500. It says exactly what it is. |
A category-wide silence on link attribution, in a category Google’s policy names by name, is not an oversight. It is what you do when the honest answer would cost you a sale.
What this means for your SEO
Directly: nothing. A sponsored nofollow link passes no ranking signal, and we will
not tell you otherwise.
Indirectly, and honestly: a press release can produce coverage that leads to editorial links someone chose to give you. Those are real. We do not control them, we do not sell them, and we will not include them in a forecast.
If a provider offers you dofollow press-release links
They are selling you the exact pattern Google’s policy names as a violation, and the risk sits on your domain, not theirs. That is worth knowing before you buy it from anyone, including from someone cheaper than us.
Applies to
- All tiers, including the Entity Program
- All agency and white-label distribution
- All syndication partners: a partner who strips our attribution is dropped
- Every existing client, retroactively. There are no grandfathered exceptions
Policy last reviewed 2026-09-05. Changes to this page are versioned in our repository.