I'm surprised you think of it so much as "inside baseball". It's pretty basic SEO. I remember way back in the day when we all used altavista.com for searching, the big change that google brought in which made it's results more compelling was ranking it's results based on how popular a particular website was, and a big measure of the popularity was the number of other sites that referred to it. Google has basically been evolving and refining this methodology ever since to counter "manufactured" linking, but the idea that more links = more clicks is what google was built on