NYTimes pollutes web with garbage text to boost search rankings of its ConsumerSearch subsidiary?
That may be the real story here. If in fact the craptastic linkspam copy was laundered through some affiliate program, giving NYTimesCo plausible deniability, they still bear responsibility.
You have to be careful when making these kinds of leaps, because anyone can link to a website. If having spammers link to you is an indication of guilt, it would be trivial to destroy your competitors by setting up link farms pointing at them. This is why Google would be unlikely to penalize consumersearch in this scenario, even if they detected the spam. They'd likely just not take that link into account.
Not saying that this happened here, just that it's not a story yet. More information is needed.
Absolutely agreed: these situations could also be frame-ups hoping to trigger Google sanctions. But then the suspects are those sites ranked below ConsumerSearch for these terms.
Someone's up to no good, and it might be NYTimesCo's subsidiary. It deserves more research.
That may be the real story here. If in fact the craptastic linkspam copy was laundered through some affiliate program, giving NYTimesCo plausible deniability, they still bear responsibility.