It's an interesting blog post that happens to be on a company's blog -- how is that any different than the thousands of other blog posts on HN from company blogs?

Inbound links are the indirect goal of every blogger. I found the article to be very informative about the details of a business segment I wasn't familiar with. What makes this article different than others?

People blog for many different reasons. I would argue that posts written to generate linkbacks and boost page rank are actually relatively unusual. I think most blog posts are either written to directly promote something on-site or to bring in direct revenue through ad impressions or because, ya know, the person just has a story to tell or an ego to stroke.

There are already plenty of well-written articles on the Web about traffic pumping; why did FeeFighters choose to write yet another article (probably heavily cribbed from others without attribution) instead of just linking to an existing one? For the juice.

Given that so many links on HN follow this pattern, however, I don't think this subthread is very useful.

Who cares, as long as the story is interesting, and well written? I actually learned something that I wanted to know for a long time, but never bothered to look up.

I agree with the [current] 4 replies, but why-o-why is eli downvoted for this opinion? It's not spam/troll, it's not badly put, it's not a priori based on a falsehood.

Do not downvote for mere disagreement. /grrrr

Eli is not adding anything to the discussion. S/he is not disputing the content of the article; just the motive. Are we going to have an SEO discussion about every article that makes it to the frontpage?

I can respect not wanting to have constant meta-discussions about each submission, but I think SEO is an interesting topic in its own right. Especially the sneaky-but-still-white-hat type. I'm not even sure there's necessarily anything wrong with it; it's ultimately based on creating content that people want to read. (I didn't flag this article, for example. It's an interesting story.)

But I think it's worthwhile to note that this post was almost surely written with the primary intent of boosting page rank as a sort of guerilla SEO.

How do you know...?

I'm surprised you got downvoted so much. I thought that too.

How is that different than this http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/16013457968/the-fixie-bike... (for which your are credited BTW)?

It's a par for the course for a startup blog.

You could say that about every blog post on the internet.