Do Adwords help rankings?

Just this month I started a (modest) Google Adwords campaign for my site and was wondering if anyone has done any research as to whether running an Adwords campaign can actually help your page rank or get you listed higher in Google's rankings?

Just a thought....!

No

<something BIGandBold> No.... </something BIGandBold>

It may help you in the starting level, and of course if you are having enough budhet, why to miss a chance of getting good business...

So it won't help you in Organic search, but may to gain some good business...

Well, it actually depends how much you are willing to pay for your campaings. As kichus said in Organic Search it won't do anything at all, that's all about SEO, keywords and a lot of updating. Instead, on the sponsored links you might get some traffic if you pay enough for the right words. Be carefull! There are Google Negative Searches, which means you can also choose which words you do not want your company to be associated with.

No bonus to natural serps from PPC.

If you think it suits googles business model to actually penalise people who use PPC in natural serps. To keep the PPC spend higher for longer.

I think at the very beginning, when the page first starts, it may help to have big G index your page earlier and/or to spend less time in the sandbox.

Just a guess, without any evidence

Google already try to penalize "e-commerce" style sites in favour of more content rich "research" sites.

If anyone is thinking Adwords is going to help them on their SEO journey, maybe another good time to read the SEOChat FAQ.

Being in Google adwords or adsense does not help you get indexed. Its a completely different bot.

Googlebot is the organic bot, mediapartners is the adsense bot.

Google's TOS on adsense and adwords say that it doesn't effect natural search rankings in anyway.

That being said, PPC is a good way to determine which of your targeted keywords is most effective which helps further target natural optimisation.
As well as this PPC gets you traffic which might result in a link being given so on those lines it may help.

As far as being on a PPC account and that directly improving results though, its pure fantasy!