“AC encourages its writers to include lots of keywords.”

So does the New York Times… Just search for “New York Times SEO”

For example, when the Pope died, Times reporters headlined stories with titles like “Papacy Change” or “Pilgrims converge on the Vatican.” They have now trained many editors and producers to write content friendly to both users and searchers. “We encouraged them to use “Pope John Paul dies”

I just browsed several Legal & Law articles on AC… Nothing unusual there.
The articles about credit had some keywords bold and it looks like the author wanted to earn some extra money via the revenue share but it was only something that a person like me would notice. It wasn’t that bad.

Other articles link the relevant keywords in the article text, back to the main category in a similar way that Wikipedia does it. Again… Nothing too distracting for the reader.

They use the technique on an article about the new iPhone… Every time the word iPhone is mentioned, it links to the main category page. (Maybe they’re trying to rank highly for that phrase)

But… they also use the same technique with the word “Sand” (How much is ranking well for “Sand” worth?)
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/21580/easy_and_impressive_san d_crafts.html

Most of the ads I saw were not from Google. I saw banner ads from the Tacoda, Tribal Fusion & BlueLithium ad networks. I also saw ads that were served by AdRevolver so I assume those were direct ad sales. (It might be a different story if it were All Google, All the time.

Maybe I just have low standards for what sort of optimization & monetization techniques are acceptable but I don’t see anything tricky, improper or evil about AC.