Reuters has reiterated that all press releases published on its site are sold via a third party, EZ Newswire, amid a press release mis-selling scandal which has affected hundreds of PR/SEO agencies and direct customers.
EZ Newswire began selling press releases in Reuters.com in September 2024 after signing an exclusive deal with the news brand, and in emails seen by iBusiness.News, the company guaranteed “permanently Google indexed” press releases with do-follow links.
Selling do-follow links violates Google’s terms of service, and in January 2026, Google issued a penalty against Reuters.com and de-indexed all Reuters press releases from its search engine.
Prior to this, EZ Newswire had deleted hundreds of press releases which clients had paid for, and it also changed all hyperlinks from “do-follow” to “no-follow” despite having sold the press releases with explicit guarantees. No refunds were issued to clients despite the breach of their written agreement, which supersedes EZ Newswire’s standard terms of service.
A few months later, the press releases began resurfacing in Google, but they are currently all once again de-indexed. It is unclear if this is because of a Google penalty, or if Reuters is excluding them from the search engine via a no-index tag.
A PR agency which had purchased hundreds of Reuters press releases for its clients solely for the do-follow links, which had been guaranteed as permanent by EZ Newswire, contacted Reuters after being denied a refund by EZ Newswire.
Reuters responded by distancing itself from the mis-selling of press releases in its own site.
In a statement, Reuters said: “We understand your concerns regarding the changes to your press releases and the difficulties you’ve experienced in your communications with EZ Newswire.
“We have raised this matter with EZ Newswire to ensure they are aware of the issues you’ve described and that they are reviewing them accordingly.
“At the same time, we want to be transparent that your agreement was established directly between you and EZ Newswire. As such, any contractual resolution, including refunds or remediation, would need to be addressed directly with them.”
Several PR agencies and direct customers of EZ Newswire shared emails with iBusiness.News in which EZ Newswire guaranteed press releases would contain permanent do-follow links and would be published permanently.
The owner of a small Manchester-based business who had purchased a press release in Reuters solely for the do-follow link to his site told iBusiness.News he was shocked that Reuters was continuing to work with the “shady” company.
“It’s shocking Reuters is still working with this shady company, who brazenly break agreements and have no interest in helping their customers after deliberately lying and misleading them,” he said.
“It reflects very poorly on a high-trust media brand like Reuters.”
In early June, a former EZ Newswire customer, Komninos Chatzipapas, posted a review on Trustpilot outlining how the company sold do-follow links in Reuters and suddenly changed their policy, at their customers’ expense.
“Scammy company. They were advertising dofollow links on Reuters. I bought two. Just a couple months later, they were all changed to nofollow and routed through an intermediary site that Google can’t crawl due to its robots.txt.
“All this with absolutely no notice. Avoid dealing with these people.”
In response to this, EZ Newswire said: “Our current setup — including nofollow links and intermediary tracking URLs — reflects Google-recommended best practices and is standard across the industry.”
While it is true that press releases do not typically contain do-follow links, EZ Newswire did not address the fact that it had sold press releases in Reuters with “guaranteed, permanent do-follow links” and offered no refunds after the policy change.
Following Chatzipapas’ Trustpilot refund, three five-star reviews were posted on EZ Newswire’s Trustpilot page in the space of a few days. All three of these reviews appear to be fake and are likely an attempt by EZ Newswire to push down Chatzipapas’ review.
In another case, EZ Newswire confirmed it would refund a PR agency for around paid 20 press releases that it deleted shortly after publishing, but the company later refused to issue the agreed-upon refund.
Another SEO agency told iBusiness.News they had been threatened with legal action by EZ Newswire after they said they would post their negative experience with the company on Trustpilot.
Reuters did not respond to a request for comment when asked about EZ Newswire mis-selling press releases in its site and the company’s efforts to silence negative reviews via legal action.
Reuters also did not comment when asked about the news brand’s decision to continue working with them despite the clear fraud that had taken place.
EZ Newswire did not respond to specific questions about it guaranteeing permanent press releases with do-follow links, and later updating its terms of service and policies without refunding any customers.
The company referred the request for comment to their legal team, and did not respond to several follow-ups about this story.
