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What I came across is a site that has a PR of 10 (I'm guessing since they are #1 when searched) and they have advertising programs. My question is, what if my link belongs in a banner ad of theirs? Will this count as an inbound link? They also have price watch on their system where my site's link and price possibly will be rotated to display on their list (my link comes and goes.) Will this affect how google calculates? Also, I'm sure it's an affiliate program so the link will not go directly to "mysite.com" but to news.com/asp?account=mysiteX or some such like that. Will google recognize that link as directing to mysite.com for inbound links?
One last thing (I promise): I've noticed that some sites had been advertising via overture and adwords about a few months ago and suddenly their ads disappeared. The thing that surprised me was their site was on the #1 or #2 spot on the non-advertising area on a VERY competitive search term. I'm guessing that since they know they are getting free exposure via the good ranking, they stopped paying for advertising via PPC. My question is, did initially advertising on overture or adwords have anything to do with the aid of their PR increasing to 10? Seems too coincedental.
For boosting your Page Rank, the best kind of link is (so far as we know) a plain-vanilla HTML link, not hidden behind any kind of redirect, not cluttered up with tracking codes, etc. Search engine spiders can't/won't read javascript links, for instance, so while you'd get traffic from such links, to help your PR it has to be a link that the spider can read.
Assuming that's the case, any inbound link will help the PR of your page. It might be a little, it might be a lot, depending on variables such as the PR of the page linking to you, how many other links are on that page, and possibly other factors that we haven't figured out yet.
Advertising in Google Adwords, Overture or other pay-per-click advertising engines does not help your link popularity, because for one thing your own URL is buried under a bunch of tracking codes, and also I've never seen a PPC engine that allowed other search engines to spider their listings. The advantage of PPC listings is targeted traffic, and only traffic. Of course, having more people visit your site might mean a better chance that someone likes it and links to it, so your PR would benefit that way.
It's worth considerable effort to drum up links from other sites, but remember that PR is only one factor in maybe a hundred that Google uses to decide how sites will rank for different search terms. Learn everything you can about on-page optimization as well, to get the most mileage out of whatever PR you're able to develop.
