How do they do it?

So I came across a site called, toptenreviews.com They have hundreds of subdomains (example of one), each of which are ranking in the top 10 for many competitive keywords. So I looked up their backlinks, they have some in an nbc article,an ehow article , wiki articles, and msnbc articles. Now these aren't comments at the bottom of the page, they have their links in the actual article. They have hundreds of different subdomains that are doing this, so there is no way they have someone manually doing it. Anyone know what program does this, or how they seem to automate everything on the site?

I have already learned alot from what they are doing, and I just thought it would be a good idea if other people were able to learn from them as well. Because whoever is running that site, has to be making a killing.