14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s anti-piracy measures are picking up, and the announced re-ranking system that will hit torrent sites is already working.
TorrentFreak reports that popular pirate sites are noticing a massive drop in search traffic, although it seems like only the bigger ones are feeling the brunt of it all.
Following years and years of pressure from the Hollywood music and movie industries, which have been accusing Google of not doing nearly enough to fight piracy, the company has made a move. The search engine has been arguing that it is not the gateway to the Internet and that it’s not its job to police the Internet, but it seems that in the end it has given in and rolled out the new algorithm to stop displaying torrent sites and links that high up.
While the entertainment industry has been pressuring Google to completely take out links to torrent sites from its search results, it’s clear that the Internet giant isn’t giving all the way in.
The company has been changing the ranking of sites based on DMCA complaints since 2012, but more measures were announced last week to “visibly” lower search rankings of the most notorious torrent sites.
Google-generated traffic sinks
“Earlier this week all search traffic dropped in half,” Isohunt.to tells TorrentFreak. They even provide a day-to-day traffic comparison to before and after the changes were implemented and the results are, as expected, quite shocking.
The downranking of these sites comes as a result of the high percentage of DMCA takedown requests. Also, when people search Google for various movies, music, and software titles in combination with terms such as “watch,” “torrent,” or “download,” the company will now much rather display legal alternatives at the top.
Isohunt isn’t the only one getting slammed in traffic, but also Kickass.to and Torrentz.eu, both of which have dropped in visibility across Google.
On the other hand, giant site The Pirate Bay continues to play out a bit arrogantly. They have a good reason, too, since they claim the changes aren’t going to affect them too much since their Google-generated traffic was pretty low anyway.
“That Google is putting our links lowers is in a way a good thing for us. We’ll get more direct traffic when people don’t get the expected search result when using Google, since they will go directly to TPB,” the site’s admins say.
The irony of the entire situation is that, while the likes of The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, and so on are getting their links displayed lower in search results, smaller sites are now taking their place at the top of the page because they haven’t been the target of DMCA requests that much.
