Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes.
Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.
And I think it's unfair to call all these guys leeches, miscreants, or whatever. I don't like a lot of the things they do, but I also respect the fact that I live in a first world country. I have a good way of living. If I were terribly impoverished and only had to spam a lot to feed my family? I'd do it. We assume everybody else on the web lives the same lives that we do. We also are getting this quasi-religious thing going on where Google must return what I want at the top of the search results. If it does not, somebody has sinned. I'm not drinking that cool-aid.
I'm with Jacques on the solution: a new protocol and the elimination of single-points-of-failure. This thing where Google keeps updating it's algorithm and tens of thousands of people keep gaming the system has to stop. It's not healthy behavior either for Google or for the spammers. And it's destroying the web.
Sidebar: you know, if you think about it, with all the walled gardens and vendors refusing common protocols and such, the web itself is under attack from multiple angles.