Dozens of PR agencies and small businesses are calling out Reuters for standing by its exclusive press release partner EZ Newswire, after the company sold fraudulent do-follow link guarantees and refused to issue refunds after quietly reversing its own written commitments.
The scandal traces back to September 2024, when EZ Newswire secured an exclusive deal to distribute press releases on Reuters.com.
To attract clients, the company marketed the service with guarantees of permanent, do-follow backlinks — a significant selling point for PR and SEO agencies, for whom link equity is a core deliverable.
However, selling do-follow links violates Google’s terms of service, and the arrangement eventually caught the search engine’s attention, according to an investigation by iBusiness.News.
In January 2026, Google issued a penalty against Reuters.com, wiping the press releases from its index. But by that point, EZ Newswire had already begun quietly dismantling the very product it had sold.
Hundreds of press releases were deleted from the platform without warning. Those that remained had their do-follow links converted to no-follow and rerouted through an intermediary site — changes made silently, with no client notification and no refunds offered, despite written guarantees forming part of the original sales agreements.
The owner of a small Manchester-based business, who purchased a Reuters placement solely for the do-follow link, said he was left stunned both by EZ Newswire’s conduct and by Reuters’ continued association with the 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 told iBusiness.News.
“It reflects very poorly on a high-trust media brand like Reuters.”
Former customer Komninos Chatzipapas went further, documenting the experience publicly on Trustpilot in early June.
“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.”
EZ Newswire responded to the review not by addressing the guarantee it had made, but by defending its current technical configuration.
“Our current setup — including nofollow links and intermediary tracking URLs — reflects Google-recommended best practices and is standard across the industry,” the company said.
Critics noted the response sidestepped the central issue entirely. EZ Newswire had not merely adopted industry-standard practices from the outset, it had explicitly sold something different, in writing, and changed course without accountability.
The press releases briefly resurfaced in Google search results in the months following the initial penalty, only to disappear again. Whether this reflects an ongoing Google action or a Reuters-side no-index tag remains unconfirmed.
One PR agency that had purchased hundreds of Reuters placements on behalf of clients — all on the basis of the do-follow guarantee — eventually escalated directly to Reuters after EZ Newswire refused to engage meaningfully on refunds.
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.”
For many affected clients, the response underscored what they see as a broader failure of accountability: Reuters profiting from a commercial partnership while distancing itself from the consequences of how that partner operated under its brand.
Reuters, for its part, has given no public indication it intends to revisit the partnership despite the fraudulent behavior of EZ Newswire.
It declined to comment on why it was continuing to work with EZ Newswire after it had misled clients.
EZ Newswire, meanwhile, refused to comment on it guaranteeing “permanent, Google indexed PRs” with do-follow links.
Several emails sent to various clients also show EZ Newswire threatening them with legal action if they shared negative reviews online.
