The answer is that they don’t think, but for the most part do what they get paid to do (or the bots are programmed to do).

Do you remember our conversation about search engines constantly constantly monitoring/indexing the forums. They also seek to feed of the popularity of the avast forums, by link spamming their wares in the hope it comes up on a search also.

When trying to optimise a site so that the search engines look favourably on it and push it higher up the returned hits, link popularity is one such tool, get your links on a popular site and your ranking could also rise.

So throw in a few links and keywords that people are likely to search on, like product names and you can see that this can promote both the product and the other site.