2013 is already here. We all celebrated it with great enthusiasm. Yes, 2012 had been a memorable year for many of us. I personally opine that each year is memorable for some reason or the other, be it on the professional front or the personal grounds. Keeping the personal things personal, let's talk about the professional front a bit.
I work in the IT industry, which is the reason why I keep on writing about IT related issues. 2012 proved to be a great year for IT in many aspects. The things which attract me most are SEO and gadgets. Let's discuss the year for each of those.
SEO : For the SEO experts, the year 2012 was almost like a year of horror. Google pushed out many major updates in 2012, mostly the Panda version and the Penguin version. There were at least 3 Penguin updates, which Google calls major updates. These updates typically re-shaped how SEO industry was acting. Apart from that, there were at least twenty two Panda updates, which Google calls minor updates. Other than that, Google also came out with the famous "Exact Match Domain" (EMD) update.
Much stress was laid on fresh, unique, relevant and useful content and importance of 'link-building' was greatly reduced. As a result, content creators made merry while traditional SEO practices suffered a lot.
Google also came down harshly on sites violating DMCA and removed 50 million pages from its SERP which violated the DMCA.
Gadgets : This year saw some of the biggest changes since 2008. The new iPhone 5 was released among many fanfare and Google launched its own Nexus 4 and Nexus 10; the former being a Smartphone made in collaboration with LG and the latter being a 10 inch Android powered tablet made by Samsung.
Samsung and Apple kept their horns locked in legal battles about copyright and other things, around the world. This reminds me that Apple removed Google Maps from iPhone. Actually tried to replace it with their own map, but after much hue and cry, Google Maps were re-introduced for iPhone users.
The year 2012 also saw another change in personal computing trend. For the first time, more people accessed the internet using handheld devices than laptops and PCs. There was a survey which says that we will see a larger handheld device market than the PC and laptop market together in 2013. This has led many companies to plunge themselves into mobile app and mobile website development.
In an astonishing data, it was shown that Android devices are getting activated at a rate never seen before.
Google sponsored Android tops the chart of smart devices all over the world except the USA where Apple still is going strong.
