I do not believe that is correct. It appears that user plays have a driving impact on the albums. This can be tested and seen by taking a digital album and changing the name in the digital files. It will then scrobble the tracks from a different album and it will appear in last.fm as such. Example, album “Take A Walk (Deluxe)” <–> “Take A Walk: Deluxe”. You will end up with two albums. They also do checking on scrobbles for common junk in the metadata of scrobbled files for common pirating site junk that is added that prevents a proper scrobble. The user is also sometimes visually warned of this and asked to keep their files clean.
The best way to add an album is to scrobble it from my experience.