What people say or indicate they want and what people need can be two very different things. The long term potential backlash from solving for the former should be weighed against the short term gains, but that's tricky!

Well, you'd expect Google to have some defenses against this sort of attack the same way they penalize keyword stuffing and cloaking.

But for all we know, they do. The TFA doesn't establish otherwise. It doesn't even establish that the author didn't update the content in June. Or that the blog unfairly ranked over better candidates.

Do people really want content from SEO spammers, though?