Yeah unfortunately that was one of the articles that honestly wasn’t as good as we’d like. Actually the piece you referenced originally had no links and through Teragram’s TK240 product the NYT has been using for the past 5 years (long before I or the SEO efforts started) links proper nouns (persons, places and things) to a page of resource.

Be it known our SEO policy is absolutely to link out to legitimate, useful and appropriate sites whenever possible (that odd reference to the CNET iPod review isn’t my idea of good linking, cross OR off-site or good user experience). Our linking strategy is obviously evident at About.com and stems from a very useful conversation I had with Jan Pedersen in 1998 about “the bow-tie affect.” This is the idea of good links in, good content, good links out - a concept internalized and executed well at About and getting much better at the NYT. It also wouldn’t be good SEO practice to trap a crawler and only helps an article from a user and search perspective to link out. Ultimately this ship take a while to turn, there’s a lot of people and software still to educate on best practices and not every one of the 1500 per week articles and 22 million in the archives can be scrutinized.

-Marshall

Chief Search Strategist
The New York Times Company