Slate's discussing how HuffPo's SEO success isn't going to last forever. He was immediately attacked in the comments by SEO professionals defending their turf.

Hey, everybody does SEO, or tries to, InfoWorld included. There are perfectly legitimate things you can do to make your site more Google-friendly. On the other hand, many SEO "pros" are the cockroaches of the Internet -- turn the light on them and they all scatter.

Operate any website for any length of time and you will be approached by . They will offer to "exchange links" or even pay you about the cost of a nice lunch for placing an article on your site or even just a few link-rich sentences. Many people do this, because they figure, why not? Nobody else is paying them to write this stuff.

The downside: If Google catches you, it lands on you like the circus fat lady falling off a high wire. After the New York Times revealed just how thoroughly Google had been punked by JCPenney, it manually "adjusted" the PageRank for all of those terms that used to be number one down into the boonies of Googledom.

In other words, JCPenney isn't feeling lucky any more.