Google has done it again and did another major update to clean the search results from spammy and irrelevant results. This time one of the most important aspects of SEO took a hit - link building.

Google latest update is called Penguin, unlike the previous series of updates that goes by the name of Panda.

Search engine optimization is combined from various aspects including content, layout, site speed and of course link building. A link pointed at your website is like a vote of trust from one website to the other and the more the merrier.

As Google evolved link building has became complicated, now incoming links from other websites must be relevant, from relevant websites dealing with the same topics the target website does, the amount of outgoing links and the anchor text (the word that the link is pointing with) all had a meaning. And then it all changed.

Corporate websites used to purchase links on relevant websites to improve their ranking, furthermore webmasters used to sell and buy links and the vote of trust has became a vote of payment.

Google Penguin update changed the game, at the end of April 2012 Google changed its algorithm so that too many incoming links with the same anchor text and incoming links from "bad neighborhood" websites will have less effect in ranking. Furthermore it was already Google's policy to punish link selling websites and so websites that did a lot of link building, as well as websites who used services to build links were "penalized" and disappeared from the search engine result pages.

This update is a good update as it brings back the relevancy and the true meaning of link building into SEO as webmasters who do good SEO know the value of good content and onsite experience for the users and don't mainly focus on link building, however some sites that don't deserve it got hit badly due to this update.

Last week Google made another adjustment to the penguin update and these sites that got hit and do not deserve it got their ranking back.

The bottom line of the Google Penguin update is that webmasters should focus more on users and the added value their website provides rather than the technical aspects of the optimization, if the visitors love the websites, they are most likely to recommend it to others and come back at a later stage - Google will have that shown on the search results as well.