2012 — Penguin Update
After their success shutting down content farms Google went after another big target, unnatural link networks. Even though paid link exchanges had been part of the SEO landscape for years, they were suddenly poison after Penguin.
The Penguin update, and subsequent refreshes, are all part of Google’s master plan to create a user friendly search engine that relies heavily on social shares. SEOs and affiliate partners are finding that Google’s new rules for link building are a lot tougher than the old ones.