slideshare and scribd can be used as social media sites. By creating informative slides we can drive traffic directly to our sites. These sites are high in alexa. Definitely a source of traffic.
To all those stating that it does help ranking, can you please prove this, because in my mind, basic logic dictates that it absolutely does not help.
If people are going to continue to post false SEO tips without being able to back things up then one of the moderators is going to have to close the thread as it’s not really going anywhere.
I’ve never used it before… but i’ve seen a lot people who put a link in the powerpoint which still can be clicked when you uploaded it… they also put a link in the description etc… I don’t have enough experience with it … but if i use my clear mind there would be a possibility it could help your rankings a bit? Or am i thinking wrong here… you still can get a link on a pretty strong website… Correct me if i’m wrong 
Check the link in these messages: http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/henkiespankie-1393235-webdesign/
I wonder if anybody could benchmark it… 
Just logically speaking, why on earth would having a powerpoint presentation make Google think your site is better than it is? There is absolutely no logic or reason behind it.
I wouldn’t even trust any benchmarks against it, because historically most SEO article sites don’t know statistics for ****. What I trust is what makes sense to me, and what I can test on my own site, and to be frank it’s not even worth testing because it sounds that stupid.
Power points slides submissions are useless if your product can be promoted through presentations. SEO-wise, they are useless.
What truely helps in increasing your rankings is your high quality backlinks and your unique content.
mhhh… but incoming links on not relevant websites still count… how many crappy article websites are online with different categories…so wouldn’t deploying links on a PPT upload websites just a strategie to get some diversity in your inbound linking structure?
That’s using the assumption that Google will treat Powerpoint like a web page.
Regardless, it would make presentations only as effective as an ineffective link, which means that they won’t really help at all, like links on crappy article websites.
It looks to me like people are talking about a couple of different things here:
- first of all “getting traffic” vs “improving ranking” (any link could potentially drive traffic to your site, but that doesn’t mean any link will improve the ranking of your webpage in the search engines)
- secondly, “backlinks on the powerpoint presentation submission site” vs “backlinks inside the powerpoint presentation” (the former can obviously be seen by google like any other link, the latter who knows, and obviously the link being seen by google or not doesn’t mean google has to give it any weight anyway)
So you could discuss the following situations:
- do “backlinks on the slideshow submission site” drive traffic to your site?
- do “backlinks on the slideshow submission site” improve ranking in the SERPs?
- do “backlinks inside the slideshow” drive traffic to your site?
- do “backlinks inside the slideshow” improve ranking in the SERPs?
All four questions have already been answered in this thread I believe, but in some cases it looks like people are addressing different questions when discussing with each other 
I’ll give you my thoughts on the matter:
My answer to 1) and 3) is that any link can potentially drive traffic to your site, but the number of people that will actually click the link depends obviously on the place and context of the link. A link inside the presentation might have a higher probability (compared with a link on the submission site) because people have already opened the presentation and are reading it (so one might assume they’re interested in the subject and in the information you’re giving them).
As said before in this thread though, incoming traffic is of little use if the page/site they land on doesn’t give them what they are looking for.
My answer to 2) is that it should matter very little (or not at all). Like links in forum posts. Because if Google were to give any weight to links that are being posted all over the web by people trying to improve the ranking of their own websites, then the entire concept of backlinks would become useless (as far as SERP ranking is concerned) because we would find useles but widely spammed links in the top pages of our searches instead of really interesting websites that give us the info/service/product/whatever we’re looking for.
My answer to 4) is that it would probably be no different from 2, IF the search engines (are able to) read the content of the powerpoint presentations.