tedster - 12:57 am on May 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

This question came up not too long ago, and at the time I could not find any "official" comment on it, or any mention in the patents that I study.

It seems clear that such mentions cannot directly help PageRank. However, I have clients whose rankings seemed to benefit from such domain name mentions in prominent media.

It could be that the stories generate type-in traffic, and some of that traffic likes what they see and decides to link. It also could be that press mentions for a domain are help to build Google's trust for a domain. I'd bet that both factors are at play. But I'd still prefer a link ;)