One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV's main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric's rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se.

Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn't help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report. The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won't be the same as removing domains from search entirely: "the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site," the company said.

But in a week, the algorithm changes have already made a difference. In addition to the sites listed above, kickass.to's Searchmetrics visibility dropped 66 percent, zippyshare.com dropped 86 percent, and extratorrent.cc dropped just over 80 percent. Should an Internet user go looking for certain material via search, they will be less likely to see these sites among the results.