In Content Chemistry, there is a story of how a company hired a PR firm to launch their new website. The firm got the site blacklisted. Learn what happened. ... Rather than write an original news release, though, the PR firm simply copied the text from the website’s home page and submitted it to the online newswires. Oh yes.
They copied the text from the website’s home page as their “news release” (I seriously hate PR people sometimes; more on that here). What is wrong with people? Can you imagine paying for a PR firm to do that? I’d be furious. But I’d be even more furious when I discovered what happened next.
Because the wires automatically post to websites around the globe, within minutes there were more than 1,000 instances of that home page content on the web. Duplicate content is a big no-no for the Google algorithms, s0 the site was flagged as likely spam and they blacklisted the domain. Suddenly the website dropped from search results, even when you typed in the exact company name....
Via Jeff Domansky
Great lesson and a bad PR, SEO outcome from a lazy PR firm.