With the recent re-jigging of Googles search results algorithm it seems some of the sites in the torrent community have been affected.
http://torrentfreak.com/googles-new-downranking-hits-pirate-sites-hard-141023/Google's previously announced anti-piracy measures have now kicked in and as a result popular "pirate" sites are noticing a massive drop in search traffic. Search results now show less popular torrent sites but not all site owners see this as a problem.
While Google already began changing the ranking of sites based on DMCA complaints in 2012, it announced more far-reaching demotion measures last week. According to Google the new alghorithm changes would “visibly” lower the search rankings of the most notorious pirate sites, and they were right.
TorrentFreak has spoken with various torrent site owners who confirm that traffic from Google has been severely impacted by the recent algorithm changes. “Earlier this week all search traffic dropped in half,” the Isohunt.to team told us.
I think we are simply seeing a knee-jerk style of reporting here, rushing to show a set of statistics that claim a large chunk of folks are being affected by a change in the short term. Taking a view over a longer period of time however such claims usually fall by the wayside, some of us have been around for the same claims made when both suprnova and the pirate bay where disrupted, and we mustn't forget "oink", in all cases after the initial assault/disruption amid mass fanfare of claims and poor statistics the situation was restored to the status quo by innovation and change in the habits of those using such sites, we have seen DHT take over from trackers in the main and with many torrent clients actively looking to feature a search engine, take this alongside intelligent usage of jurisdiction shifting activities that ensure a regulator in one land cannot actually take down a web site based in a far off land and its clear that ultimately copyright enforcement entities are in fact fighting a losing battle,
