If you want to save your work from this penguin you may avoid to over optimization, un-natural links and irrelevant links.
To save your work from penguine algorithm you have to remove your all negative work and guide the all guidelines of Google Penguine.
It's good to target your work according to these algorithms. This however has not stopped the SEO business, many new companies have emerged after the shift so one can easily say that SEO work is still valid and important in page ranking.
Penguin hit to the sites which have bad links. I had a site which is totally lost from search engine. I had lot of backlinks from article submition sites. Don't through your links to low value sites.
Any algorithm is not harmful for SEO. Its only effect sites those are doing over-optimization, keyword stuffing, duplicate content and many other things. Important thing is that how you are doing your site seo.
With latest Google Penguin update the most important things that should be taken care of are - – Use relevant keywords – Use User-friendly URLs for the website – Generate more social content – Use relevant alt tags for images – Reform all the broken links – Minimal use of non-indexable elements For understanding the Google ranking and penalization pattern better, you can also check out "Google Quality Guidelines".
If you want to save your work read the guidelines of google penguin like putting your links to a relevant sites.. If you do spamming links on the net penguin will caught you I am sure of that.