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Google has applied some kind of penalty to Torrent website KickassTorrents (KAT) to make it completely disappear from its index, a situation that now means scam sites pretending to be the torrent indexer now tops popular search terms.
Google algorithm, which determines how high sites will rank in search results, has long been demoting piracy related results (based on the number of DMCA requests each site receives). However, the demotion penalty is only meant to lower the position of the site's pages in search result, it was never meant to complete remove results.
The KAT team told TorrentFreak that they've been aware of the penalty for some time, but things apparently have escalated recently.
"It's already about five or six months since we started to experience some kind of penalty from Google. The issue is that we were not performing any SEO activities at all," KAT says.
The removal of all official KAT results from Google now means that unofficial and unaffiliated results now occupy to the top positions for all KAT related keywords. Depending on your location, the top spot for the keyword "kickasstorrents" is now occupied by either kickasstorrents.pw or kickasstorrents.eu. The former serves adult advertising over what appears to be a copy of the KAT site, while the later promotes an unrelated download that may be malware.
The KAT team is still investigation the possible cause of the penalty, and urges users to visit the official Facebook and Twitter to find information on the latest official domain name for the site.
Google algorithm, which determines how high sites will rank in search results, has long been demoting piracy related results (based on the number of DMCA requests each site receives). However, the demotion penalty is only meant to lower the position of the site's pages in search result, it was never meant to complete remove results.
The KAT team told TorrentFreak that they've been aware of the penalty for some time, but things apparently have escalated recently.
"It's already about five or six months since we started to experience some kind of penalty from Google. The issue is that we were not performing any SEO activities at all," KAT says.
The removal of all official KAT results from Google now means that unofficial and unaffiliated results now occupy to the top positions for all KAT related keywords. Depending on your location, the top spot for the keyword "kickasstorrents" is now occupied by either kickasstorrents.pw or kickasstorrents.eu. The former serves adult advertising over what appears to be a copy of the KAT site, while the later promotes an unrelated download that may be malware.
The KAT team is still investigation the possible cause of the penalty, and urges users to visit the official Facebook and Twitter to find information on the latest official domain name for the site.