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.

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.

Source: NowTorrents Becomes TorrentFly After Google Penalty

In November 2008, someone used a forged CA driver’s license to take over Torrentz.com, and put some of his own ads on the site. Luckily, the hijack took less than a day to bring to an end and things were back to normal before most users even noticed that something was wrong. But Torrentz is not the only torrent site to interest hackers.

NowTorrents, a torrent meta-search engine that recently acquired a spot among the 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet, is facing a similar problem. This morning, the admin of the site noticed that he was no longer in control of the domain name as it was transferred to a new registrar, GoDaddy.

Coincidentally, the admin also had two of his email accounts hacked, which could very well be the cause of the domain troubles. He told TorrentFreak that he is doing all he can to resolve the issues. Google has reinstated one of his email accounts after some emails back and forth.

GoDaddy, where the domain was transferred after it was hijacked, is currently looking into the case. It can usually take up to a week before the domain gets transferred back to the rightful owner, the admin said. However, by putting in some calls to a supervisor at GoDaddy he hoped to speed up this process a little.

How the ‘hacker’ gained access to the domains remains a mystery for now. The email password was secure and not really guessable, and all signs currently point to a keylogger. It wouldn’t be the first time that this has happened to an admin of a torrent site.

Nevertheless, the admin of NowTorrents is confident that he will soon regain access to his site. Meanwhile its users will have to be patient and look for alternatives until the site comes back.

Update: the site is coming back slowly, waiting for the DNS to propagate.

Source: NowTorrents Domain Hijacked by Hacker