Sponsored Themes as Link Development
2nd November 2008
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Was making a list of ways to conduct Link Development, and decided to revisit the subject of Sponsored Themes. Sponsored Themes are when you pay to be the “sponsor” of a Wordpress Theme. Your textlink goes into the footer next to the designer. Then, the designer/owner uploads the Theme for free downloading to the Wordpress Theme Directory. Then, if a lot of people download the theme, it’s very likely that many will NOT take the sponsors link off. About a year ago, Wordpress posted a survey whether or not they should remove sponsored themes. Wordpress’s official position on this is: …all themes with sponsorship links will be labelled as such when they are published, non-sponsored themes will be published first and we require sponsorship disclosure to be made to us when authors make us aware of their new themes. If this disclosure is not provided and the theme has sponsored links, the author will be barred from being able to post their new themes on weblogtoolscollection.com until further notice. There are several ways how to outsmart the system, for example - just hire someone to create totally original themes on your behalf, and have the only credit link to your own site where you distribute it. Google (Matt Cutts) is trying to scare you into thinking that Sponsored themes can cause you to lose your TrustRank in the Google Algorithm. That’s ridiculous! Sponsored Themes that contain an inconspicuous link in the footer. It’s perfectly normal for websites to contain outbound links in the footer. There’s a great discussion at WebMasterWorld. Bottomline, I think a link in a Sponsored Theme can help your SEO efforts. But, don’t think just because you built it, they will come. Just like everything else, the Sponsored Theme will need a wide distribution, and a marketing effort to create the beneficial SEO value you initially intended. Those marketing methods to promote your Sponsored Theme can include Social Media, Email, PPC, Word-of-Mouth, etc. Related posts: |
November 3rd, 2008 at
Shimon, If sponsored themes arent a reason for a penalty, what’s happening in http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/59e796b85327a4b2/59ff6ae317b03ee3 ?
November 5th, 2008 at
Jason, that is likely caused by a proxy attack, not just by sponsoring themes. However, due to all the attention the site owner raised in the forum, many people started speculating.
If done in a smart fashion, sponsored themes work. The same can be said for other forms of Link Development. Done the wrong way, big brother (Google) could, and I emphasize could, find you…and penalize you. Bottomline, sponsored themes work.
November 6th, 2008 at
I ran a test in this a while ago to prove a point to a client, I pushed a sponsored theme on 100 really bad domains and put dupe content and very adult themed content, the site that had sponsored the themes that was ranking isn’t any more, of course it could be a number of other things that made it drop to the 50’s..
DaveN