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Sponsored Wordpress Themes
I am using a new theme today for this blog called Black & White and sponsored by yGoy which is some sort of health portal by Amitabh Shukla? If you are familiar with Wordpress you know that there are many themes available from the theme viewer. You can pretty much make a theme, add whatever footer links (hacks) you want and upload it to the theme viewer. If people like your theme they download and use it just as I am doing today.
Amitabh makes nice themes for the price of footer links to promote his website, check them out. I do not believe in footer links via “free” Wordpress themes so I hope this post is a good payment for usage.
Anyhow, the above is just a guy looking to earn a few links but I have seen everything from themes that come with Adsense enabled to themes that come with hacked plugins that put evil files on your server to rank networks of spam sites for ringtones.
How do you guys feel about sponsored themes as a form of SEO? Is it fair to have someone rank for a phrase like “internet marketing” simply because they make free themes with the correct link text in the footer?
(this “disease outbreak” footer link goes to a MFA “made for adsense” site, also notice the link text for hotels and web design.)
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April 30th, 2007 at 6:26 am
Honestly, I think they’re stupid when it comes right down to it. There are a bunch you can get for free that don’t require a link, and it’s not that difficult to come up with your own.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:45 am
You are not the average user Adam.
Not sure what I am talking about people? Go here, click on “Test run” under some themes to check out the links in the footers. There are some pretty funny ones. ;)
April 30th, 2007 at 8:37 am
I’m average! I’m even stupid! Just ask all the spammers that keep telling me so!
April 30th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
No, I always remove them. A run of site link in a footer is probably not as helpful as they think, and I don’t think the theme is really worth the PR my sites can give.
I do generally link back from the About This Site page, but not run of site.
I often have to do so much rework on the theme to make it usable that it isn’t worth a credit anyway - I am really using it as a source of graphic design; the implementations often seem sorely lacking, but I am a bit of a Web Standards Maven :)
And, now, of course, we hae the issue of whether such a link should be nofollowed *sigh*
April 30th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Yeah, this stuff makes me unhappy also…
May 4th, 2007 at 6:44 am
It sure is becoming a major problem. The majority of themes I was looking at had dire outbound footers i.e. credit card sites etc.
Very unfair to the average WP user who has no clue on the damage these links can actually cause.