How online pirates are beating Google

A plan so simple and clever even Cersei would applaud it.

Have you ever heard of the illegal torrent website known as 1337x?

If you haven't, it's likely because Google removed it from its search results after receiving a take-down request.

Despite not being widely known, the torrent site has been around for a number of years and has recently seen a large spike in traffic.

The increase is believed to be a result of highly popular website KickassTorrents recently being shut down by the US Government.

"To be honest, it has been a rollercoaster with traffic," the site's operator told TorrentFreak.

Realising there was a gap in the market for a new king following the demise of KAT, the people behind 1337x devised a genius plan to beat Google at its own game.

Understanding Google were forced to comply with the original take-down request because it listed a variety of popular torrents on its homepage, 1337x redesigned its website.

The new layout features a search box on its homepage, with not a torrent in site.

"Due to our old index being blocked by search engines, new users were having issues finding the website. We developed a new index page that contains only search, so we don't get blocked by search engines in the future," reads a notice on the website.

The operator of 1337x said it would likely take a while before Google made the website appear in search results, but the redesign would work in the long run.

Changes to the homepage are not the only thing different on the website, with updates appearing throughout the site.

"Seeing how cool a responsive layout could look we decided to make a whole new front-end. That literally took months to develop, and we changed back end code as well, which fixed several bugs and issues that were in the old version," the operator said.