hmm. to take a guess at what the deal is…
in the earliest wayback machine link for his site (here), his homepage says he’s a newbie blogger and indicates he doesn’t know much about SEO. he started the blog as a hobby after retiring, having previously had some success creating a website for his business and successfully learning enough about SEO to get it some momentum.
in september 2022, in a post amidst some generic seo-bait-titled blog posts, he posts this entry in which he says that SEO is an interest and hobby of his!
it also looks like he tends to blog in bursts of activity; in 2022 and 2023, then again this month.
i think that he is probably being honest in that post: he finds SEO itself interesting and enjoys blogging with an angle to SEO. it seems like when he’s in a blogging mood, once in a while, he posts a flurry of posts with different variations on a theme / different titles that are not super different from each other, and then enjoys seeing which ones perform better w/r/t metrics and keywords.
so i don’t think he posted “ragebait” exactly; more like everything he posts is SEO bait, because looking at those numbers is interesting and fun for him, and the bait that works on the indie web is “blogging as a hobby is fun”. the bait was bitten, and then when people went to look at his other posts they found the bait that hadn’t worked on them, and chomped on that anyway (thus turning it into ragebait).
i don’t see much indication via the wayback machine that he’s ever engaged with any particular blogophere, nor does he have contact info or comments sections on his posts; probably receiving any kind of response to his posting at all was a surprise, and not necessarily a pleasant one.
that’s my headcanon, anyway. it looks like the follow-up arguing posts aren’t archived and i haven’t read them, so maybe i’m wildly offbase 