TorrentFreak Email Update

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TorrentFreak Readers’ Top Articles of 2010 Posted: 31 Dec 2010 12:23 PM PST We did it again. Despite being chronically understaffed we managed to get at least one article published on TorrentFreak every day in 2010. Although we aim to regularly publish articles worthy of being listed in a year's end overview, rather than choose those for inclusion ourselves we felt our loyal readers should do the talking. So what were the hottest debated topics in the file-sharing world this year? Let's find out. At the TorrentFreak office we toyed with several ideas to form the basis of this list. The largest failures, victories, losses, innovations and so forth, but it seemed impossible to make a good selection without leaving some of the best stories out. So instead we decided to go for the articles that our readers found interesting enough to discuss in volume; the most commented articles of 2010. Below are the 25 most discussed articles of the year. It’s been an exciting ride, with many ups and downs, and we’d like to thank everyone who read and contributed for your support. Do you have a favorite that didn’t make the list? Feel free, as always, to comment below. Happy New Year… We’ll report for duty in the morning. 1. U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More (November) 2. U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs (July) 3. OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free (January) 4. ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Law Firm Torn Apart By Leaked Emails (September) 5. The Pirate Bay Goes Down Following Legal Pressure (May) 6. Digital Economy Bill Passes, File-Sharing Ends Soon (June) 7. Leaked Emails Reveal Profits of Anti-Piracy Cash Scheme (September) 8. BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures (November) 9. Senate Committee Passes Bill To Quash Pirate Websites (November) 10. 'Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple' US Vice President Says (June) 11. The Pirate Bay Appeal Verdict: Guilty Again (November) 12. 4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites (September) 13. The Mysterious And Scary BitTorrent Monitoring Site (April) 14. LimeWire Shuts Down After Losing Court Battle With The RIAA (October) 15. 4chan to DDoS RIAA Next – Is This the Protest of the Future? (September) 16. LimeWire Resurrected By Secret Dev Team (November) 17. The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay's New Host (May) 18. World's First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden (July) 19. Police in File-Sharing Raids Across Europe, WikiLeaks Host Targeted (September) 20. IP-Addresses of First Hurt Locker Victims Revealed (June) 21. Mulve – The Nightmare-Scenario Music Downloading Tool (September) 22. Demonoid Faces Major Downtime Once Again (April)) 23. Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Copyright Infringers (March) 24. US Lawmakers Want to Quash Pirate Websites (September) 25. RIAA Wins Big Against File-Sharer, $1.5M for 24 Songs (November) Article from: TorrentFreak.

Google Helps Seized BitTorrent Site to Regain Lost Traffic Posted: 31 Dec 2010 08:06 AM PST The domain seizures by the U.S. Government in November hit the sites affected badly, reducing their traffic to a trickle overnight. One of the sites, BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, is refusing to throw in the towel and shows how futile the seizure was. In addition to taking legal action to hopefully recover his .COM domain, the owner has been working hard using Google tools to regain lost traffic. Back in November when the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized more than 80 domain names of sites they claim were infringing copyright, the effect on their traffic was instant and massive. With their domain names no longer under their control rendering most existing search engine links unusable, most of the sites all but disappeared. Some, however, refused to give in and moved immediately to new domain names. One of those is the BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, which relocated to a .info domain it already owned. Just after the seizures, TorrentFreak asked site owner Waleed Gadelkareem how the action had affected his traffic. The response was clear – the domain seizure had set the site’s traffic back massively. Like many other torrent sites Google was the main traffic source of Torrent-Finder, so even with the .info domain ready traffic initially plunged up to 90%. Google was simply sending the traffic to the seized .com domain, not the new one. But for this determined Egyptian, patience, hard work and a little help from Google was to set the site back on track to recovery. At the same time, Waleed shows how futile the U.S. seizures are for sites that are determined to continue their operations. “Google webmaster tools are very important for any website’s SEO and I had already registered torrent-finder.com on my cpanel and confirmed ownership,” Waleed explained. This registration meant that using the “Change of Address” option on the panel could be done immediately. “Then I had to direct all linkbacks to the new .info domain by contacting webmasters or changing it by myself if I could. You can see the result on Google analytics of search engine traffic,” says Waleed. (see below) “Slowly Torrent Finder is getting back most of the indexed pages that we used to have on Google, and of course the targeted keywords,” adds Waleed. Despite the encouraging signs of recovery with the .info domain (thanks to Google), Waleed is also continuing with his legal action to reclaim his .com domain with the help of lawyer David Snead. Waleed hopes that the mistakes that were made will serve him well in his case. Article from: TorrentFreak.

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