Ever since Kickass Torrents and Torrentz shut down, other torrent alternatives such as The Pirate Bay have seen a sudden spike in traffic. 1337x.to is a brand new site design to step up and challenge these sites to become the definitive Kickass Torrents alternative.
As reported by Torrent Freak, 1337x has been around for some time, but it has seen a few issues in the past few months. Last December, some of the moderators reportedly revolted against the site owners, and it also saw an increase in traffic when Torrentz was still around. Traffic has since been going up even after Torrentz shut down.
To date, it is now rated among the top five torrent sites. Despite this, Google has taken down the homepage due to a recent takedown notice. The old homepage listed some of the most popular torrents of the day, and it was quickly discovered, flagged, and banned on Google searches.
In order to work around this, the site has since implemented a brand new, responsive design for its homepage.
"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 new homepage.
Speaking to Torrent Freak, an operator revealed that they got carried away and went ahead to re-design most of the website. This includes redoing the codes for the front-end and the back-end of the website. Work is not yet done as they are also bringing back the forums in a way that users can still log in with their old 1337x accounts.
It is still uncertain if the site can top the likes of The Pirate Bay, but given how traffic is steadily rising, and with fake torrents being uploaded on The Pirate Bay, it would only be a matter of time before 1337x becomes a more popular choice.
