Weight on Non Hyperlinked URL's?

Does Google give weight in their algo to non hyperlinked URL's?

[erthlng]

I completed a pr project for a client about 3 weeks ago. As a result google shows over 7000 pages in their search engine results related to this pr "event", where there were none before. While looking through these results, I noticed that many of the stories that were printed by newspapers contained non hyperlinked URL's to my clients Web site. This was also true of many blogs that were written on the same topic as well as posts to online forums.

Most of the non hyperlinked URL's appeared as sitename.com. This got me to thinking that there are a large number of non hyperlinked URL's on the Web, which are intended to have the significance of a hyperlinked URL but are not coded as such. Blogs, online forums, news stories and many Web sites are loaded with them.

As an example - On Google I ran a search for Web pages that contain the text for the URL of a large online auction site using
"example.com" -site:example.com
and got 27,600,000 pages. I then ran a search for Web pages that hyperlink to the same auction site using
link:sitename.com
Google returned 181,000 pages.

Many of these non hyperlinked URL's should have the same weight in the Google algo as a hyperlinked URL because the intent of the writer was to show where the Web site was located. Others probably should not have the same weight, but I suspect that the smart people at Google could (or already have) determined some weighted average significance to these non hyerlinked, "Orphan" Url's.

Is there more significance given to non hyperlinked URL's in Google than we give them credit for? Has anyone seen any evidence of this?

[edited by: ciml at 10:49 am (utc) on April 8, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]