Gawker Properties Becoming Keyword Honeypots?

Anyone else notice lately that the Gawker sites are going a little crazy with the keyword linking? I read both Deadspin and Valleywag everyday and they have all these unnecessary links in their posts deep linking to category pages on their own sites.

Take for instance this post on Deadspin. What's with linking ESPN to this page? Same with Kobe Bryant and Paul Shirley. It's a wonder they didn't link the word "douche" to a tagged page. Same with Valleywag. Why link to an environment page on this post? All this linking makes me not even click the links to the outside sources.

I know that SEO is a very dark art that I don't come close to understanding, but is this an attempt to bring more search traffic in? Create these big lengthy verticle pages with post after post about a particular topic and hope/know your search rankings will rise on that word?

Sounds like a SEO Honeypot to me, no? Who knows, it probably works. I need to talk about smelt a lot more, then deep link to a smelt tag page and who knows. A few years from now, maybe I'll be on the first page of results when someone Googles "smelt".