[cd34]

It is possible that the company was hired to do SEO and drive traffic to the site and has nothing to do with the site. It is also possible that once it gets good rankings, they will sell the traffic to another site.

In order to profit from ppc or cpa spam, you need a mule site. These guys generate the traffic, find some unsuspecting guy in a niche that they have cornered, offer to partner with him and bring him a bunch of relevant traffic. All he has to do is split 40% of his revenue with them. They might even let him set up a shadow site so that he only has to split traffic they bring in. They bring their real clicks plus their botnet clicks, he starts to see revenue, sends them checks like he's supposed to - until google shuts him down at which point they find another mule site.

Many different ways to use botnets for profit. Since spam is getting much more difficult, they are transitioning.