Do AdWords Ads Help Increase Backlinks (in-links) for Link Building?

Unfortunately, the answer to this is easy; NO. There are multiple reasons why this is an ineffective method of creating backlinks. Check out this SEO Forum Article titled “Do Adword adverts count as backlinks from adsense sites?”

Reasons AdWords Ads Don’t Increase Backlinks

Search Engines Spiders or Robots Won’t Read JavaScript Data

So here is the first nail in the coffin; your AdWords ad is written in JavaScript. Search engines robots and spiders do not analyze Javascript (yet); they simply will not read and interpret the data. A search engine spider will not conclude that the object is linking to your site. And finally, even if they did, AdWords ads work by redirecting the user through Google’s servers –not directly to your website.

AdWords Redirects Traffic Through Google’s Servers Before Linking to Your Website

That’s right; even if AdWords ads counted as backlinks, Google would be first on the list of beneficiaries. If you notice the status bar in your browser after clicking on some AdWords ads, you’ll notice the URL “google.ad.sgdoubleclick.net”. Read this article about a common problem with Mozilla Firefox causing redirection error(s) that preventing you from contacting this server (and can subsequently cause problems displaying Google AdWords ads)

Does AdWords Attribute to an Increase in My Google PageRank, Rankings or Pages Index?

Again, unfortunately, NO, says Matt Cutts. (Or, supposedly no, say the conspirators) Check out this posting from his blog, summarized below:

“Joining service X (AdSense, blogsearch, News crawl, any Google service that uses a bot) doesn’t queue up pages to be include in our main web index … Just as always, participating in AdSense or being in our blogsearch doesn’t get you any ‘extra’ crawling (or ranking) in our web index whatsoever. You don’t get any extra representation in our index, you don’t get crawled/indexed any faster by our webcrawl, and you don’t get any boost in ranking.”

Read Matt Cutts full article about how Google services affect PageRank and other domain and link scoring.