The new domain helps KAT bypass ISP blockades and Google's anti-piracy algorithm, and unblocks millions of links

Nov 18, 2014 13:30 GMT  ·  By

After the many trips The Pirate Bay has made around the world last year, it looks like another big site is under threat of taking on a similar path. KickassTorrents, one of the largest torrent sites in the world, has also moved shop to a new domain, choosing Somalia.

Unlike the Pirate Bay, which was being hunted around the globe by anti-piracy groups seeking to sink the boat, Kickass is moving to a new domain as part of its “annual rotation,” TorrentFreak reports.

Therefore, instead of Kickass.to, the site can now be found at Kickass.so. The move seems to be part of a system put in place to circumvent various anti-piracy measures, even if this is only temporary.

There are millions of users on the platform and many of them have already accustomed themselves to just visiting the homepage rather than taking the search engine route. This means that it’s quite important for users to know the new address even though accessing the former link will simply redirect people to the new location.

The site has had some problems in the past, having to switch domains due to issues with the registrar, so it was believed originally that the situation was similar this time around, with the site having to move shop due to some legal issue or another.

The KickassTorrents team says, however, that this was just annual domain rotation. ”We are moving to kickass.so now. As you know we change our domain regularly. Nothing more has been changed for you, so don't worry, you can use Kickass as usually, it's automatically redirected,” the team said in a statement published to the site’s blog.

The benefits of the move

For the moment, until new limitations are set in place, the new KickassTorrent site is accessible in countries where ISP-wide limitations have been already set. The changes may not work in the long term since anti-piracy groups are usually quick to push for the expansion of the list whenever a site gets a new home.

There’s also the fact that there are more than 1.6 million links that have been blocked by Google following DMCA notices, which will now become available once more, thanks to the new domain. The downranking system will also be temporarily bypassed, so KickassTorrent links will likely appear higher up in the search results pages.

If you remember, Google has a new antipiracy algorithm that takes into account the DMCA notices it receives for these sites and pushes them lower on the pages. This has caused a traffic drop for most sites, including the big ones such as The Pirate Bay and KAT.

Kickass.so (4 Images)

KickassTorrents has a new domain
This time, they've moved to SomaliaThe move will free up blocked links in Google
+1more