NowTorrents Becomes TorrentFly After Google Penalty
Written by Ernesto on October 23, 2009NowTorrents, the fastest growing torrent site of 2009, lost 90% of its total traffic two weeks ago, being ‘penalized’ by Google. The reason for the Google penalty is unknown but the NowTorrents owner has now taken the opportunity to relaunch a new version of his search engine under a new name – TorrentFly.
At the start of 2009, NowTorrents was a relatively small torrent search engine with 30,000 visitors a day.
In the months that followed its traffic exploded and the site soon settled itself among the ten most popular torrent sites, with more than a million unique visitors a day.
NowTorrents attributed its success mostly to Google. The owner had spent a lot of effort in optimizing the site for search engines and this certainly paid off, as 90% of the visitors came through the search mogul. But two weeks ago, everything changed. Suddenly the traffic wave from Google was reduced to a trickle, causing the number of visitors to plunge.
NowTorrents’ founder told TorrentFreak that he tried to contact Google about the issue, but the company said it couldn’t comment on the rankings of search results. It’s clear that the site has not been removed from Google, as all of its pages remained indexed. However, NowTorrents pages do show up much lower in the search results, an indication that Google may have penalized the site.
It is not unlikely that Google decided to downgrade NowTorrents because it was a little ‘too well’ optimized, so to speak. Google has been known to punish sites that try to artificially inflate their search rankings. Although the site’s founder is not aware of anything that might have upset Google, the traffic drop was irreversible.
Google ‘Penalized” Nowtorrents
For the site’s founder there was no other option than to start over from scratch. In fact, he took the opportunity to relaunch the site under a new name, hoping to get back some of the Google juice. He was already working on a new version of the site, so the timing couldn’t have been better.
The new and improved NowTorrents has been renamed to TorrentFly today, and regular visitors will notice quite a few changes to the site’s layout and search functionality.
One of the new features is that members can not only can pick which sites TorrentFly should search, but also in what order the results should appear. Another advantage for members is that they won’t see any advertising.
“Aside from the layout change and added features, TorrentFly has a ton of minor changes and improvements to the backend, which should result in better and faster search results,” the site’s founder told TorrentFreak.
Indeed, the search results on TorrentFly appear within a few milliseconds and the changes to the site are a step in the right direction. Now all TorrentFly can hope for is that Google stays friendly.
Previously: 3-Strikes For Pirates Makes European Comeback Tour
Next: Leading TV Show eD2K Site Celebrates Birthday With Torrents
73 Responses
Awesome site.
I’m loving the new layout! Much improved. I do not think the name is an improvement, but the site certainly is. I have it bookmarked.
Wow that sucks for the owner… must have been a nasty day when that happened.
The new site torrentfly does seem like a good improvement, so users will benefit from this drop that happened.
btw,
Since this story was posted Torrentfly has 502Mil+ Searches served already!
I have a feeling this site will be big (:
@4 That data is taken from the NowTorrents database, as are all the 180.000+ members.
Any SEO people here who can comment what might have happened? A large google update that affects search results that much lately?
take on down another 100 will pop up in its place, their tactics are fruitless.
http://piratesagainstpedos.co.cc/
Very good and clean design, gets my approval!
seems to run pretty well, liking it so far :D
Good site. Nice layout.
http://Pirlog.com
@Franz -
There’s no telling. Google – Microsoft – Yahoo – and others publish guidelines for folks to optimize their sites to achieve good results positioning….
However – the Search Engines never publish exactly HOW they accomplish this – proprietary algorithms and all. So in reality – SEO is a guessing game very much like the stock market or the weather.
Meta-search sites are a dime a dozen, why reward a site that spends all its time and effort trying to “game” Google rankings?
TF should not be wasting its time with these bozos. The only new torrent sites worth giving publicity to are those that run public trackers — and preferably don’t try to cheat Google’s rankings by pushing out honest torrent sites.
THIS IS A CRAPPY SITE… I REALLY HOPE THAT GOOGLE OWNS THE SITE AGAIN!
NowTorrent and TorrentFly = CRAP + FAKE TORRENTS…
IF YOU DOWNLOAD _ANYTHING_ FROM THE SITE, THEN YOU CAN BE SURE THAT MPAA IS WAITING OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR!
THIS IS A CRAPPY SITE… I REALLY HOPE THAT GOOGLE OWNS THE SITE AGAIN!
NowTorrent and TorrentFly = CRAP + FAKE TORRENTS…
IF YOU DOWNLOAD _ANYTHING_ FROM THE SITE, THEN YOU CAN BE SURE THAT MPAA IS WAITING OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR!
“Don’t be evil” my arse!
I HATE WEBSITES THAT SPAM GOOGLE, SERIOUSLY TYPE IN “PRODUCT DOESN’T EXIST DOWNLOAD” AND YOU’LL GET “PRODUCT DOESN’T EXIST PRO EDITION 2009 FAST TORRENT” AS A RESULT.
CAPSLOCK MORE LIKE WINLOCK
Why dont they ‘penalise’:
http://www.eztvefnet.org/
http://www.suprnova.com/
Both fake scam sites… Grrr
@GuESs what is your problem?
If you do your homework, TorrentFly does not host any torrents. It only links to other torrent sites. So go blame those sites.
You can disable the sites you do not like. Torrentfly is ad free as well. So get your facts right!
Nice site, wish there was an option to filter out .rar containing torrents.
Big improvement, i used nowtorrents a lot.
TIP: Just be sure to set up only the sites you like and trust!
I always set my search to: Mininova, ThePirateBay, Isohunt, Vertor and Torrentz.
If you do that, TorrentFly is uber handy!
It was search engine spam and it was rightfully bumped down to where it deserved to be.
If the owner uses the same tactics with the new domain hopefully the same thing will happen again.
nice looking site. good luck to the owner
I don’t get why the site needs to rely on Google for visitors continuously. 900,000 people don’t know about bookmarks and forget all about the site after they leave?
@23 Tripple 8 here, most torrent sites see Google as their MAIN traffic source.
I personally love the new TorrentFly.org
Ok, I never google for torrents, didn’t know that many do!
Really sounds like the site owner is trying to get around the site penalty that for whatever reason Google imposed. Google though doesn’t take lightly when folks try to get around penalties like that. Don’t expect the new site to be well indexed either.
Would have been better if they had just stayed with the old domain and knocked off whatever they were doing.
As to their penalty, they probably just got dropped into the Google Sandbox like most new sites wind up in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sandbox
Google does a lot of shady stuff. There’s a website called “rip off report” that pretends to be a consumer activist website, but as many people (including well known technologists) will attest, it’s actually a giant scam. The guy who runs it will NEVER remove any content and ANYONE is allowed to post complaints on there. And it doesn’t have to be a complaint about a company or a business person. You can post complaints about your ex boyfriend or your neighbor or someone that you feel slighted you at some point in life.
Then, the guy who runs the site, will take off complaints (and future complaints) . . . IF THE COMPANY/PERSON PAYS HIM. It’s extortion.
The guy also does a lot of shady SEO spamming crap. Yahoo and other search engines drop the guy’s results very far down the list as a result. What does google do? They PROMOTE his results. So if an ex girlfriend is angry at you, she can ruin your reputation via the site and it will show up in the top two or three results (and certainly ont he first page of results) on Google.
WHY does google not only allow it, but promote it like it was a wikipedia entry?! I have no idea. You can google around for lots of discussions about this controversy.
So how reliable and accountable is the site? Well, someone awhile back posted a complaint that the CEO of google had raped a sixteen year old girl.
So… fuck google.
“Really sounds like the site owner is trying to get around the site penalty that for whatever reason Google imposed. Google though doesn’t take lightly when folks try to get around penalties like that. Don’t expect the new site to be well indexed either.”
The Rip Off Report website and guy do TONS of evil SEO stuff that go against Google policies and google REWARDS them by putting them at the very top of the search results. Why is a torrent site penalized while a site that extorts money out of victims of slander and libel gets promoted?
@27, ripoffreport should be at the top because it’s more useful compared to a torrent site. You can hear of a warning before putting your hands into something that will cost you lots of money, makes sense to me. No need for a torrent site to be on top of search results, but if people visit them everyday, they will definitely be on top.
Difference between Google and The Piratebay (or Newtorrents)explained here: http://www.futureofcopyright.com/kb/45.pdf
First people have to realize SEO peeps are scams.. It’s rather simple.. He either overdid it on the SEO and google auto penalty or he started placing some bad content etc.. If the same thing happens with torrentfly that is why.. All these cruddy indexing sites which allow crap or fake content listings are slowly decreasing as google changes the algorithms still alot of work left though.. Sandbox is ok.. Default is still worse IMO..
Really depends on methods he was using for SEO.
If Google went as far as penalizing site – I’d say it was extremely likely that “black SEO” (doorway pages / linkfarms / spam, etc) was in use. Same as email spam if you ask me.
There are lots of normal sites with decent content or service that get pushed out of Google’s results because of such stuff. Eventually such sites get closed and are lost for internets, kinda sad.
great site (at least till eztv.it comes back online) thanks
“If you do your homework, TorrentFly does not host any torrents. It only links to other torrent sites. So go blame those sites.”
Get your own facts straight. From their front page:
‘TorrentFly is able to detect and remove fake/dead torrents.’
That’s what they claim. So there!
As effective it might be, the text ads’ just confuse lots and lots of potential new users.
http://www.torrentfly.org/torrents/this-is-ads.html
Since NowTorrents/TorrentFly puts such importance on spamming Google, what’s to stop them from spamming TorrentFreak?
I strongly suspect that most of the positive comments are being posted by the TorrentFly admin himself (under a variety of different names)
@34
Seems to be his tactic. Search Google for “godius comments torrent”, “godius torrentsnow”, “godius torrent seo”.
Just threw in a few searches for some hard to get stuff and wow found them in a few seconds. Nice site.
Will be using this over BT Junkie
@elKukaracha
I agree. TorrentFly is definitely shilling this discussion board.
For instance, just look at the post of “888″ above, who makes a statement that only a torrent site operator would know AND has heaps of praise for TorrentFly.
As it’s a rare thing for any torrent site owner to ever compliment a competing website, that leaves just one likely conclusion …….
I smell a rat, and the stench is getting unbearable.
i came across nowtorrents a year ago,while searching for torrents on google.com
and while i searched nowtorrents,i got great results and i continued to use it,but yesterday,when i typed in http://www.nowtorrents.com
it took me to torrentfly
I love the new layout and site works perfect..
and when it was nowtorrents,i dint sign up,but i signed up now…as members can optimize settings
I love how they claim right off the bat that their are a legal website. I guess this new wave of legal action is actually having an affect on torrent sites.
They are not legal. Their sole purpose is to help people find torrens, the prevailing use of which is theft.
Google is different because it is a website search engine, not a torrent search engine. While google can be used to find torrents, millions of people use it for legal things everyday. Intent obviously matters.
Let me be clear.. I actually think torrents are a great idea.. They would work very well for legal things like game demos, game videos, etc.
Loving it so far
i mainly do all the torrent search through it..Nowtorrents.aka Torrentfly is GOOD!
The Browser plugin Icon of Torrent FLY is just a dupe of Torrent Freak..OMG..waht a ball!
SEOing shit.
I tried it out. It requires Java script, FYI. So if you have JS blocked, the search won’t work.
It should tabulate all the results before displaying them, in my opinion.
I only tried one search, and there were loads of results. Probably why it was a bit slow for me.
Anyway, you have to sign up to change the search preferences. Why not just use cookies? Are you required to sign up to use any other search engine? Not any good ones.
Never the less, it is another very useful search engine, and I don’t think it should be received so negatively. Maybe I’m missing something.
@Soundwave. It would be nice to see all the results there before the page loads, but then it would be just another TorrentZ site…
The real-time feature requires the javascript, and now i think 99.9% of people have JS enabled.
Its fast here for me.
Site gets low ranked by google and suddenly the numbers of visitor drops a 100 fold, and as a response the ‘only’ thing to do was starting a site with a new name? I smell a rat, they probably used a trick to fool visitor counters and when that was fixed the real numbers became clear and having been exposed the scam artist do what scam artist do, scurry under a new rock, I don’t trust it one bit.
torrentfly is not a new site. The scammy nowtorrens owner has run this site for ages along with torrentbug.com and some other domain, using the very same coding on every site – just with different logos. he seems to care far more for the amount of visitors (and ad revenue) he gets than the actual content he can provide his visitors with…
ugh, stay away.
nosh is right I think. I found nowtorrents redirecting to torrentfly yesterday and i thought my pc was infected by some malware because I do remember visiting torrentfly before. It is definitely not a new site.
And everytime i do a search, avira 9 heuristic scanner detects a html malware.
nosh is right I think. I found nowtorrents redirecting to torrentfly yesterday and i thought my pc was infected by some malware because I do remember visiting torrentfly before. It is definitely not a new site.
And everytime i do a search on torrentfly, avira 9 heuristic scanner detects a html malware.
Good for google~! One thing you MUST admit about google is that they know what they are doing — thats why they are the BEST. XXX (nowtorrents) — only lists (or did) torrent sites that PAID him money to list them and he has a slew of BS torrent and other sites such a torrenthub that he uses to try to feed each other traffic while also trying to fool google. BTW – did I mention that he also steals, uses or borrows every piece of content for EVERY one of his sites. Yet LMAO — when his source code got stolen, used or borrowed he cried his ass off like a little bia bia.
#51 You nailed it.
> Although the site’s founder is not aware of anything that might have upset Google
Um. Like search spam techniques? You gotta do some nasty stuff to get penalized by Google.
Saying that 90% of your visitors come from Google is basically saying that you have no original content or service and no regular users who care. Just ton of one-time visitors tricked by SEO crap.
oh — I forget to mention that the owner modifies (inflates) peer data on site results to the highest bidder for an additional fee on top of site listing fee. So — don’t think your getting accurate results from torrentfly’s limited site search engine.
Now back to torrenthub (also owned by the same guy) — Check out how this works:
torrentfly’s search results redirects all traffic to the torrent details page of sites that pay to be listed with torrentfly with the exception of his other site torrenthub (of which the owner graciously gives top priority amongst the other listed sites) — Now get this –> torrenthub has a torrent details page just no torrents!! LOL Thats right no torrents — click on a link to download a torrent and where does it take you?? Mininova torrent details page!!
So lets do this in order
Search > Torrentfly > Torrenthub > Mininova > Result
Looks like someone is trying to play on fast one on all of us including Google — Trying to get a dollar out of 50 cents — well LOL a nickel.
The idiot that uses torrentfly to search for torrents, most likely also wipes his arse before and after he takes a shiz
The layout is really great!
Cheers from http://www.kickasstorrents.com
^ Speaking of spam ^
I guess let other suckers pay for torrent hosting, search processing and legal troubles? Piggybacking is so fun… Cook up PHP script in 30 minutes and there you go.
This is sad guys, but “meta-search” is 90% scam/SEO/traffic juggle.
Your friends from http://bitsnoop.com/
Google is the best torrent search site!
why google did this ? torrentz.com has more trafic than nowtorrents. why google does not penalized torrentz.com.
@59
Because torrentz do not use SEO crap to try to fool Google apparently.
I just went to the torrentfly website and did a search for a recent film (Surrogates) and I got several aXXo results. WHAT!!! I did other searches and found that all the most recent movies have aXXo results. I suspect that Google penalized them for being linked to alot of FAKE torrents (since axxo hasn’t up’ed anything for >6months). Just my humble opinion.
Yup, dont mess with Google dude. Afterall, one day they will rule the world!
Riff
http://www.anonymous.ua.tc
Meh, I’d be happy to see them gone. Search for anything + torrent, and you’ll get fake results from NowTorrents and their ilk. Generally with a google hit along the lines of “woo we have it!” -> click -> “Nah, we don’t have it. Have some ads instead!”
This just reeks of desperation from someone who loves those ads a bit too dearly.
Good riddance, hope it gets shot down again.
Wow! I can’t believe all the vitriol against this site. Out of all the links I’ve found in articles on TF, this one was really useful.
For example, I looked for Hawaii 5-0 and actually got some results! I’ve searched everywhere for 5-0, but could only find some on TPB. I’m sure Demonoid has some, but I’m not registered there. Any site that can help me get to see McGarrett and the boys is OK with me. I’m happy.
FYI – I’m not spam, or a troll, or a flamer, or a homo. I’m a 46 year-old American expat living in Asia that can’t buy the stuff he wants because it doesn’t exist here!
^ brudda ^
you may search for hawaii FIVE-0 and get results from a lot of sites…
http://torrents.to/search/btjunkie/hawaii%20five-0
(try the other sites and… surprise.)
uggh im very close to hating google these days.. there becoming more evil and evil by the day.. its only a matter of time it seems.
@61
No, Google doesn’t give crap about fake torrents.
They ban for search spamming – when site is made out of ads and site owner tries to do SEO thing – fool Google into thinking it’s more relevant than other similar.
SEO is actually bad for the user – instead of getting useful results you will get ad-filled “free download for $100 per year” pages.
wow a heck of alot of fakes on there but it is just a link site so looks alreet though and once other sites get on there then maybe it will take off who knows lmao
This has actually been a very interesting, yet educational experience.
I actually run http://www.entertane.com, and I’ve been wanting to jump to a real-time, all-in-one meta search like nowtorrents or torrentz. I didn’t know you guys had so much contempt for nowtorrents. If some of you could provide some feedback as to what features and type of site you’d appreciate most, we will try to build something with those needs in mind.
Email me at admin@entertane.com or post right here. Thanks.
Amazing, my full support to the initiative.
Loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooog word
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