When you are selling things on the web you pretty much live and die by your ranking in Google.
The most pool cues are not sold through fanatic websites like AZ Billiards but instead through searches on Google for "Pool Cue".
And the most sales go to the first ten (really the first five) online stores in Google for any search term.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization is the practice of trying to employ various techniques to improve the ranking of websites for key search terms. Higher rank equals more sales.
Google's system of ranking relies heavily on what are called backlinks, links back to a website, like this For Great Pool Cues please visit
CueSight. Google's spider will come and scan this thread eventually and it will file this link and the associated text into it's database and this link will count in some tiny way towards the ranking score for CueSight. (not much though as Google does not give much weight to links posted in forums and blog comments)
Google has a system of assigning value to websites called Page Rank. Basically the higher the Page Rank the more a link FROM that page is worth to the website where the link points to.
So for example, a popular blog with a high Page Rank can give you one link to your website which is worth more than a thousand links from forums or low Page Rank sites.
So one method for websites to boost their own Page Rank is to create blogs which they try to make popular and then on those blogs that they control they can control which backlinks that they give out.
Linkbait is content that is designed to get a lot of links coming in. So for example if I posted on my blog that Efren Reyes was going to have a sex change operation and play on the WPBA then it would probably get a lot of links back to that article on my blog from other people's blogs and forums.
Google would see that and conclude that my blog must be good because of all the backlinks and my page rank goes up. In turn I can then put up a link to another website and pass them some "link Juice".
So all this is to say that sometimes companies will put up blogs with controversial content for the sole purpose of generating a lot of linking that eventually, maybe, will result in better ranking for an e-commerce website somewhere in the chain.
Unfortunately when the content is really negative and acrimonious and personally attacking then it crosses the line from being a marketing exercise into a hurtful endeavor.
It's my opinion that the PCN blog was a marketing tool for PoolDawg that got out of hand.