I've recently noticed that the majority of links pointing at my competitors page seem to be coming from on page PPC ads on semi-related websites.

A lot of these pages are spam-like pages (low page rank), that use adsense and affiliate network links to trick novice web-users, while some are fairly legitimate sites that use targetted ads to increase their site revenue.

Regardless. I long ago turned off content match on all of my PPC campaigns as I found they yielded very low conversion rates. Now I'm wondering if turning them on would automatically increase my inbound links.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Do SE's index the on page adlinks rendered by google and others? Does this help page rank and inbound link counts?

Thanks,
Marc

The links in PPC ads are not direct links to your competitors websites. They have no effect on ranking. Many affiliate sites will, however, mix direct links into their pages along with their PPC advertisments. These links may, or may not help your competitors. Opt into content match only if it is a good fit for you, not in the hopes of boosting PageRank or your SERP's...it will not help at all in those areas.

I'd agree - but I've sent you a personal message with some google link: search details that seem to contradict.

For everyone else - I see in these results, dozens, potentially hundreds of pages that don't even currently show links to the competitor but do in the google cache.

Most of the pages have parameters in the URL that make it clear they were generated by search strings. Like : http://www.uncoverthenet.com/search/?q=contact%20management%20software

Most have different ppc ads up at this point, but it seems as though they had links to my competitor at some point. And that is positively affecting their results.

Any thoughts?

I PM'd you regarding the secific example.

The problem here was that you were including a space after "link:" By doing this you were seeing results for sites that contained "link" and "http://www.example.com" You were not seeing backlinks. If you want to see back links you need to use the command "link:http://www.example.com" Notice that there is no space after link:. In addition, Google is not the best at showing backlinks. You wil get much more accurate results by using the same command at Yahoo! You can also use Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/).

Hope this helps!

Ah - I see. By putting the space in, my back link search included the PPC results that had www.example.com somwhere within the string.

Well I guess my question becomes:
Is there any benefit in having your website url contained in strings on other pages? What if it contains your keywords? or is it moot since the links aren't direct.

Thanks,

Marc

I think you nailed it on the head...it is moot as they are not direct links.