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As the main aim of a press release is for the press to pick up and give your newsworthy content exposure to their wider audience I would consider having it on your site but you could sit it in a sub-directory that had a noindex, nofollow tag on it as essentially it is there for repeat press visitors. It isn't really there to be indexed and rank in terms of the content of each press release page so this should matter. This is how I previously ran one site successfully - a press center with noindex, nofollow on it and then if it had something important that required more detail there would be a separate in-depth piece written and added in the news/blog section.

A sub-domain as you suggested would also work in my opinion.

When I did this before I also made sure my press center had a lot of calls to action all pointing at an email subscription form so I could email any press contacts every time a press release goes live (you may already have this in place but I thought I would mention it).

I would still consider adding a no follow to any links in your releases - as you say it isn't a link building tactic.

Hi Kevin,

Just a quick question - have you found that you were hurt due to the press releases being grabbed by other sites and they contained links to your site that you had included in the release?

From my experience the best way to deal with press releases is to use them for what they are meant - to bring exposure from a wider audience and not to use them to gain links. I personally nofollow any links in press releases and they still work well. I also only include raw URLs either at the homepage of site or at the page of something specific that I am writing the press release around. This is all pretty obvious but I still see people messing up with press releases.

I think having a separate press center is also a good idea as you mentioned.

Hope this helps...

Personally I would look at creating a main category page and then have the services in pages below that allowing you to fully optimise each of these services. Having separate pages means you will be able to optimise all the on-page factors specifically for each service strengthening the chances of ranking for more of your services as key factors such as the page title, h1 header and other on-page content will have the specific service keyword in them. Don't forget to make sure your meta description is also specific and has a good call to action in order to help encourage the all important click-throughs from the search engine results. Also make sure your URL is optimised to contain the relevant service/service related keyword. As you say you need to create unique content for each. Having separate pages in your internal link structure allows you so much more freedom to optimise for the specific services based around relevant keyword research for each. I would also consider how you could possibly earn relevant links to these pages as this will also help increase their authority and ultimately ranking.

You might find having a look at this useful - http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/learn/seo/internal-link

Hope this helps!

404's can loose link juice and cause the most issues when a page that had lots of link pointing to it passing authority becomes a 404 page. As this page no longer exists the authority that was being passed to it from the links that were pointing at it will be lost when Google eventually de-indexes the page. You also must remember that this page is likely to be in Google Index and if people click on it and it is not found they are more likely to bounce from your site. You will also loose what terms this page was ranking for when it is eventually de-indexed as well. Redirecting this page to its new location or a similar/relevant page will help keep most of this authority that has been earnt helping with your ranking and keeping human visitors happy.

You also need to think of this from a crawl point of view - lots of 404s doesn't make your site very friendly as Googlebot is wasting time trying to crawl pages that don't exist. Ultimately making sure you don't have 404 pages and keep on top of redirecting these is important particularly if the page had authority. A great big hint to the importance is the fact that Google reports these crawl issues in Google Webmaster Tools in order for you to be able to monitor and fix them.

On a side note I have seen cases where sites have had a lot of 404s due to a significant change of URL structure and they haven't done any redirects - they have lost the majority of their organic rankings and traffic!