File-sharing websites The Pirate Bay and Isohunt claim the new way in which Google is organizing its search results will drive more direct traffic to their home pages.

Websites that have been flagged for aiding access to pirated content now automatically appear lower down on Google search lists.

The Pirate Bay and Isohunt both say that Google is not their main source of traffic in any case.

YouTube videos are also subject to the new rules, says the US search giant.

Isohunt’s owner had suggested that the Google-owned video clip site would be given preferential treatment because it was excluded from the firm’s Transparency Report list of sites that had provoked copyright removal requests.

A spokeswoman for Google said: “This update applies to all websites including our own – YouTube, Blogger, etc.”

Isohunt's owner had suggested that Google-owned video clip site YouTube would be given preferential treatment because it was excluded from its Transparency Report list of sites that had provoked copyright removal requests

However, since copyright flagging is just one of many factors which influence Google’s rankings, it is unlikely that it will have much impact on platforms dominated by user-generated content, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Google added that material on YouTube which infringed copyright would be removed from the website completely “in accordance with the law” if it became aware of it.

The new search results are organized according to the number of factors, including the amount of “valid copyright removal notices” Google has received about individual sites.

Those with more notices are likely to appear lower down.

“That Google is putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us. We’ll get more direct traffic when people don’t get the expected search result when using Google,” said The Pirate Bay in a blog post.

“The thing we don’t like with this is… they’re dictating terms.”

Gary Fung, owner of BitTorrent Isohunt, said that only 21% of its traffic came from Google.

“We have plenty of torrent links to non-copyright infringing content, and we’ll be adding 1.4 million more from the Internet Archive soon,” he wrote on an Isohunt forum.

Gary Fung also queried the validity of the removal notices which he claimed could be spammed.

Those wishing to protect their copyright on YouTube are encouraged to use a free tool called Content ID which digitally fingerprints their work and notifies them if it appears on the site, Google said.

The copyright holder can then decide whether to leave it, have the content taken down or make money from it by adding adverts.