Rumors have been swirling lately about a possible new Google algorithm update. Several SEOs have been tweeting, posting in forums, and blowing up Owdy chat with stories of how their sites rankings have changed.
We reached out to Google for a statement, and our confidential source (Ed – Is that still Ted the janitor?) has confirmed that they did hear someone in the restroom on the phone at “the plex” state that they’d recently changed line 2097 of the core search algorithm. Here’s what he scribbled down (on a piece of toilet paper) and smuggled out, exclusively for us:
Line 2097 used to read
pagerank = pagerank + 1;
however this new change replaces that with
pagerank++;
Our source, however, refused to confirm or deny the rumor that the comment on line 2096, which allegedly addresses this key line of code, may have also been modified to detail the reasons behind this news that’s reverberating around the SEO world today, as at the point that was mentioned, the gentleman in the other stall flushed.
This new change increases coding character efficiency by over 54%! If this is replicated across the algorithm, we can expect Google searches to now be so fast that this may be a precursor for linking your mind directly to the web, and searching by thought (suddenly the reason they called the last update RankBrain makes a lot more sense).
After sharing this news in our top secret SEO group, the group was immediately split into several factions – initially focused on whether or not pagerank++ or ++pagerank would be more efficient before devolving into a heated argument about why PascalCase is superior to camelCase and finally ending up in a discussion of vi vs emacs vs pico before Godwin’s law was invoked and the discussion ended.
Stay tuned to WTFSEO for our next post on how character efficiency is correlated to SEO rankings and the top 10 tips for increasing your code character efficiency, which will be closely followed by a post on how to concentrate during a thought search, so you’re not constantly searching for bikini pictures of Supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
