Can a ppc campaign INDIRECTLY affect search rankings?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: I would say that any kind of traffic through a campaign (whether PPC or not) or no campaigns can indirectly affect search rankings. The more traffic you get, the likelihood of getting links in return from those that go through your site.
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  S?awomir Zdunek: In my opinion it can. Everybody knows that PPC campaigns and organic rankings have nothing to do with each other. That's the fact. But I think that if somebody visits a website by PPC they leave some traces in Google's memory. Next time if the same person makes a related query, Google can come up with a page from the website visted by PPC earlier (but of course they don't have) I think the personalized results can be affected by PPC campaings. That's only my theory. ;
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  Kirk Fletcher: It is officially stated that PPC will not affect ranking. The traffic that is supplied by an Adwords ad is monitored by google and is discounted against ranking factor. The bounce rate/engagement level are ignored when traffic is derived from Adwords. If it did count then all it would take for a company to rank on the first page would be to throw a fair wedge if cash at Adwords for a while and boom, job done. This was put in place to stop this activity from taking place. Spammers would seriously abuse this if that was the case. However having said that getting users to a particularly engaging page on your site could possibly result in that user mentioning your site on their social networks and maybe ever linking to you from various places such as forums etc. thus is the only SEO benefit I can envisage. Hope this helps :-)
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  Devin Peterson: +Kirk Fletcher ; You may be right but... I'm not sure why the viewer stats from adwords wouldn't be important at all? If a company throws money into an adwords campaign doesn't mean they will get amazing results from it, you still have to have good content and usability. I know it's been officially stated that adwords doesn't affect your organic rankings... but... it clearly CAN affect ranking in some ways like you just mentioned about the social buzz and linking... but viewer stats don't fall in to that category? Can you show me where you got that information saying they don't use adwords viewer stats at all? I am just curious, not arguing with you though :-)