My problem is when companies think that "do everything we can for <metric> while staying just inside (and maybe a little outside) the boundaries we're given" and "do what we can for <metric> in line with our business values" are the same thing.

A company that I would support would look at the link tactic and say, "damn, that's anti-consumer, anti-business, and pretty shady all around. Let's build our site traffic by making our content better and working with Google to figure out ways to improve our site's searchability."