PageRank, Technorati, and Free WordPress Themes
OK, first of all I want to preface this by saying that I have never, and will never try to game any ranking system. OOO — take that back, I did include sponsored links in some of my first free WordPress themes, but other than that, I’ve never tried to game a ranking engine. AND, I would never recommend you doing so either.
However, one of the very fortunate side effects of releasing free WordPress themes is that you get a killer amount of backlinks for your trouble.
And to be honest, I don’t really mind recognizing, and leveraging that fact to my benefit.
Always include two links in the footer
That’s right, as of right now, there is no blowback for including a link to the support page of the theme, along with your name as the author. This means that not only are you getting steady backlinks to the individual theme, but also backlinks to your homepage.
What is that so important?
OK, let’s say you’ve released 5 free themes. Each one of those themes contains a link to the support page for that theme. Let’s also say that you get an average of 200 backlinks per theme released.
Would you rather have 200 links to 5 different pages on your site, or 1000 links back to your homepage?
I’d personally rather have the latter. Why? The more backlinks to a single page, the higher that page’s PageRank will be. And the higher your pagerank, the more value Google places on your links, thus making your homepage a powerful and influential player in the keywork arena, and making your site much more valuable.
Yeah, it’s minor and a bit petty, but by including two links in the footer, you really do give yourself a distinct advantage on the web.
However, the second this becomes a no-no in the WordPress community, you should stop doing it. Just like with the sponsored theme controversy, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the fence if it becomes an issue. A single link is better than no traffic at all.
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8 Responses to “PageRank, Technorati, and Free WordPress Themes”
I’ve been seeing the same thing happen back when I released a few themes, it’s a well known fact. It’s nice to see the incoming links here and there.
There is only 1 problem to this method that I see, you have no control over what kind of site (might be a site blackballed by google, or might be a spam site) which can adversely affect your ranking.
One slight fix for this is to include terms with your theme (although it might not be followed) that excludes use by sites of ill regard (porn, spam blogs, etc). Good luck and I’m enjoying your latest theme very much.
Comment made on October 23rd, 2007 at 2:32 pmMark,
For sure. But I doubt that a few blackballed sites are going to outweigh the overwhelming amount of neutrally ranked sites in google’s eyes. Maybe I’m wrong though, I’m not an SEO expert.
Like you said though, I highly doubt that shady sites are going to follow your guidelines for usage.
Comment made on October 24th, 2007 at 8:05 amNathan. thanks for the explanation on the links. I’m a bit sorry links have become such an issue in the free Wordpress themes community. I’m happy to display your links, just picked up on this theme and it’s really working well for me. Thanks!
Comment made on October 24th, 2007 at 8:02 pmJust wanted to say thanks for the Elegant Blue theme.
I am using it for my new blog and its just perfect. Also the feedburner integration is awesome.
Thanks again
Regards
Comment made on December 24th, 2007 at 12:07 pmAlfred
A good read, thanks. I agree that many links pointing to the homepage is better than the same number being distributed all over your site. I think its is beneficail however to have a large number of inbound links with your keywords in the anchor texts. These should point at all pages and will help them rank higher in search engines also. This will have a reciprical affect and make all your inbound links that little bit more valuable.
Comment made on May 20th, 2008 at 5:23 amthanks for the info.
Comment made on June 18th, 2008 at 12:11 pmWordpress simply rocks for PR… Use it wisely and you are on top… Great CMS system.
Comment made on July 15th, 2008 at 6:11 pmHi,
Comment made on July 18th, 2008 at 7:02 amI really like your blog and would like to offer you a professional
and quality free theme or free beautiful header related to your blog.
Please let me know if you’re interested or visit directly
http://www.freewordpress.org
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