2012 was a big year for SEO and arguably the biggest shakeup was the Google Penguin update. As you probably know, Penguin targeted web spam tactics like link schemes, exact match anchor text, blog networks and so forth. Link building tactics that had, for better or worse, been working fairly well for a lot of site owners are now penalizing those same sites and many site owners that were hit by a penalty are still struggling to recover. As a strictly white hat SEO professional whenever a Google update comes around I don’t panic and worry what is going to happen to my site’s search presence because I know that I’m not doing anything that might ever make my site (or the sites of my clients) show up on Google’s radar. Instead of looking for loopholes within the algorithm to exploit I’ve always focused on building high-quality links from a variety of sources that will serve as gateways to my site and help drive targeted traffic over time.