Yep, you're right, but the way that the parent company was directing traffic was down to setting up a bunch of unrelated pages on the site with spammy links that direct to their main content.

The company handled data on investing, but their CMS was full of pages relating to totally unrelated things like Nokia phone repairs. It was the standard long tail approach, where a thousand pages of spam getting 10 visitors a day was enough to give them a legit boost on their main pages.

When the Panda update hit, these pages killed the site, and the spammy links propping these pages up were next to worthless.

I think when (s)he said "paid for spam" which could be low quality out-sourced content. I assumed links to begin with too, but not no mention of links.

A mixture of both. The site had a ton of long tail pages for unrelated content with outsourced content and spam links set up from things like forum posts, and hijacked academic pages.