Cameron, I always recommend businesses link to their press releases. Doing so provides value in different ways. First, if there are no links and no references to it, it basically has no value, Second, you get a little bit of third party validation from it. Third, you can get visitors from it and brand recognition. I know of releases that we published in 2005 that still get hundreds or thousands of visitors each month, because they have incoming links. Don't base all your decisions on what immediate link juice you might get from an action you take, because it may hurt you some time in the future. And yes, prlog is good. I have some I will send there this week.

There has been a lot of discussion about press releases.

You can't only do things that you consider give you pagerank power.

(well you can, but that's not the real world)

If press releases were dead, why do the big PR companies still charge $300+ for a press release and issue 1000 to 2000 of them every day?

Press releases work. They get your name out there, and if other sites pick them up and publish them, you get access to their readers. If a journalist or blogger picks it up, you get more coverage.

Yes, my site publishes press releases, but thats not why I'm  saying this. I'm telling you because it works. If it didn't work, I would stop. I have press releases that get hundreds of readers every day, so if you have a story to tell that is worth reading, you could get those readers.

Honesty pays, I think. Google knows pretty much what you did. The engine guesses, but when a live body checks on your request, it's not likely you will fool them. They know which sites sell paid links. If someone else also paid for links from that site and they already did a reinclusion request and said they bought links from that site, you paint a target on yourself if you don't own up to it - unless you really didn't buy the links.

You could wait up to a month for any response, going on past history. Be sure you're disclosing everything you know about in one request. Don't think you can keep sending them in because, from what I've read, they will eventually stop listening.

I can't help you with protocol, other than to say spell it all out because they can't read your mind and expecting them to guess probably won't work in your favor.

Hi EugeneF

The problem with tel: is that most browsers don't know what to do with that, so they see it as a URL relative to your site, and when you try http://www.google.com/tel:1231231234  there is no such thing and of course, you get a 404 error.

So here is another gotcha that we will all have to cater for in our robots files and .htaccess files.

What you need to do, to handle that, is to detect that you are dealing with a smart browser that understands what to do with it, and only display those anchor links to those browsers.

The upside, of course, is that either robots or hopefully, real people are clicking on your phone links.

The downside is that if they are real people and they get a 404 error, you are giving them a bad surfing experience.