AfterDawn: News

Google's tweak to its search algorithm to leave out results from popular warez sites has destroyed their traffic, visibility

Google's continued practice of tweaking their search algorithm to leave out results from popular torrent sites and other warez sites has destroyed traffic to those sites and services.

Search results to popular sites like The Pirate Bay, Torrentz.eu and Kickass.to have fallen at least 45 percent in the last week, while other less known sites have seen their SEO visibility fall as much as 97 percent, effectively killing any traffic to the sites through Google.



Google started their tweaks against DMCA violators in August 2012, and began downranking sites that received high amounts of piracy-related complaints. Last year, the search giant received over 224 million DMCA takedown requests and that number is going to be much higher in 2014.

"In August 2012, we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA notices," added Katherine Oyama, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel last week. "We've now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites. This update will roll out globally starting next week."




Source:
Searchmetrics

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 29 Oct 2014 11:31

• Previous article

• Oppo unveils world's slimmest smartphone: The R5

• Next article

• MEGA's Dotcom fighting to get back his seized millions

• 3 comments

• bhetrick

  So what's a good, unadulterated search engine?
  

  31.10.2014 10:53 #1

• hearme0

  Originally posted by bhetrick: So what's a good, unadulterated search engine? I think Google is..........
  
  This article claims it "destroyed traffic to those sites" (torrent sites) by having redone the algorithm.
  
  So as I understand, Google is less adulterated now :)
  
  Correct me if I'm wrong.

  1.11.2014 10:56 #2

• qazwiz

  just how much of your income comes from anti freedom organizations and how much is from afterdawn?
  
  I repeatedly see your "big brother is good" comments on 90% of the threads i read. this tells me you are either purposely creating controversy in attempt to drive trafic or you are a troll being paid to put make-up on black eyes of organizations like the RIAA (just an example org)
  

  qazwiz is qazwiz everywhere. If you see me say HI!

  11.11.2014 15:25 #3