Selling Text Links in Free Themes

There seems to be a new trend among theme designers/developers that involves selling text links to third parties within a theme made for distribution. For those of you who are unaware, theme distribution is a fantastic way to get yourself and your website known. This basically entails creating a theme (for WordPress, vBulletin, IPB, etc), adding a text link back to your site somewhere on the theme, and distributing it for free. I’ve used this method to get thousands of easy, free backlinks in no time at all. It’s great for exposure and even better for business if you’re the one who made the theme.

I have been seeing recently, however, people beginning to exploit this easy link-building method by selling out link spots on these themes to third parties (here, here, here, here, here, and here for example). All of those examples took me about 3 minutes to collect. I noticed this trend developing a few months back but quite honestly never thought it would catch on. I honestly didn’t think people would really do this on a large scale – I thought more of them. This is poor practice on so many levels. I barely know where to start.

Why Buying Links in a Free Theme is Dumb

Lets begin with the people actually spending money on these links. They’re all SEO types, of course, doing everything they can to generate easy links without actually working to get real ones. They don’t make the theme, they don’t code the theme. They pay $10-30 for one link in a cluster of other sponsored links on a theme expecting to get thousands of backlinks pouring in. It’s the perfect plan, right?

Wrong, dummy. First off the click traffic will be little to none (for the most part). Many of the people buying these links are your typical gambling, pharma, etc – shady niche pushers. The ones promoting legitimate sites still often are totally unrelated to the theme’s platform or web design in general. We’re not talking about a baseball site releasing a baseball template to promote themselves, that would make sense. We’re talking about a baseball site buying a link on a pretty pink theme with bunnies and poodles all over it. The direct traffic, if there is any, won’t convert at all.

So we get to the SEO benefits! That’s the real reason for investing in text links right? After all, where else can you get thousands of backlinks for the teeny tiny price of $10-30? Nowhere, that’s where … right? It’s the perfect plan, right?

Wrong. For starters, most of the themes being released and whored out to link mongers are the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. Even if some people do download and actually use these themes I doubt there will be a large enough number of them to justify throwing money into a link on it. Secondly, most people downloading free themes don’t mind leaving the link at the bottom to the designer and distributer. After all, they put in the man hours creating this beautiful template so that the downloader could enjoy it. How many of these people do you think will actually leave a cluster of spammy links at the bottom of their template? The people buying the links don’t own the rights to the theme, they just paid a few pennies to get their spam site plastered on it. There is no obligation (unless specifically indicated) to keep that link there. And trust me, with as much experience as I’ve had with people removing my perfectly legitimate links, I guarantee you the vast majority will be deleting the hell out of these spam link clusters before they use the theme.

Why Selling Text Links in Your Free Themes is Wrong

As developer or designer who releases a free theme is doing a service to the community, and of course to themselves. The downloader knows that work goes into making these things and more often than not have no problem with allowing a link to the designer’s site even alongside a “made possible by:” link or something of that sort. They almost all know going in that they will be giving some link love to the designer. Most of them don’t expect, however, to have their blog become a spam billboard when they install a theme. Not all bloggers or website owners are entirely savvy, and many of them may not even check the footer of their theme. There is a trust among theme downloaders that when they get a theme they can upload it without worries of glitches, bugs (for the most part), and amazingly inappropriate spam. By whoring out text links on your themes you are violating this trust whether you are aware of it or not.

As a developer or designer you should also be aware of what factor these links play on SERPs. Not every blogger may now the implications of Google’s “bad neighborhoods”. As a tech savvy person you have a responsibility to these people, who are looking for nothing more than a pretty template to make their blawgs kewler, to not mess up their search engine rankings. How pissed would you be if you started dropping rank one day only to realize that new theme you installed had 20 spam links clustered at the bottom? You’d be pretty pissed.

Moral Responsibility

When talking about morals in online business I usually get a ton of rolling eyes in my direction. Hell, I look the other way with a lot of black/gray hat techniques. I guess I have a “put it to the man” mentality in that if I see someone trying to game Google, I don’t mind all that much. That doesn’t mean I approve of it, I just usually don’t care enough to say anything. These spam links clustered in free themes, however, affect actual people. Spam links violate their trust and actually have a good chance of affecting their search engine rankings. As a designer or developer you have a moral responsibility, in my opinion, to not include anything inappropriate in the themes you’re distributing. To me you may as well be hiding a surprise Zango install in your theme. You’re exploiting people to make a buck. It’s lame. So stop it.

Rant over.