i have a few URLs on high PR sites that don't have active hyperlinks kinda like how sub.domain.com is not hyperlinked. i know it doesn't hurt but in any way does it help with PR or serp?
Thats an interesting question, I would say no they don't help. But will be interested to see what other people think
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help PR and rankings at all. The most you could hope for is some direct traffic from people who copy and paste the url.
I have a similar situation where people have legally copied and pasted my articles from article directories, leaving my bio in. Except in my bio on their website they dont use a hyperlink for my website in my bio. So it appears as just static text. This is very annoying.
If it's not a link, it can't be counted as one, so it won't help with PR. It could potentially help a site rank for the phrase "www.yourdomain.com" which could drive a small amount of traffic. It might also drive a small amount of traffic from cutting and pasting the URL as was mentioned by vansterdam. I don't see how it could help PR in any way though.
Mr. Dee nailed it on the head. If it is not a link, it does not count. Then they did not 'legally' copy your article. Anchored links have to be left in tact. It is more than likely those individuals are using some automated software which scrapes the article sites and strips out all Html formating. You can verify this, not only by the un-anchored links, but if you use elements such as unordered lists (ul) for example, and that formatting has also been stripped. I suggest that you contact the person that illegally syndicated your article and ask them to put back in the formatted Html per the terms. If they refuse, then report them to Google for copyright infringement.
I don't think they count, but google is getting better and better every day and might start counting them sometime. I would like to know if google are using their ocr (optical character recognition) program that they use for google books on images in pages. They might also start to use their face recognition program recently implemented in picasa web.