PR Web - Free Releases End & SEO Consequences?

I read on Armand Morin's blog (who read it elsewhere) that as of October 23, 2006, PR Web will no longer accept free press release submissions. The new fee structure will start at $80 to submit a release.

Now, I don't blame a company for limiting it's submissions...it was bound to happen as press releases became an Internet Marketing FAD, rather than the sound public relations opportunity they are.

But here's what really caught my eye and triggered my "I don't know about that" radar:

I logged into my account to see what was up at PR Web and I saw a new interesting "LinkWriter" option. PR Web now accepts anchor text in the link in your press releases provided you pay a minimum of $200 for your submission.

Hmmm...paying $200 for keyword-rich incoming links. Not sure how the powers that be at the major search engines will see that. Given the massive size of PR Web...certainly it's not that hard for the search engines to get wind of this and possibly evaluate the links accordingly.

Of course, I don't have a crystal ball on this one and maybe Google and others will always see PR Web as an authority site (rather than a link broker) and there won't be a problem. Still, I'd watch and see how useful those anchor text links are in the months to come.

By the way, I reference PR Web as a free submission service on a number of my websites and in my Press Release Profits course. I will be updating those references in the next week or so, please be patient.