One of the methods regularly described for building loads of inbound links is creating free themes for WordPress. But, you could be wasting your time! Read on to find out why and how to make them work.
If you have been reading around round SEO and you are any good at designing and building websites, then you might be tempted to build several WordPress themes and make them publicly available for free. In return, you just slip your backlink into the footer of the theme and hope that most users keep it intact. That way, you have suddenly created hundreds of incoming links.
But, these backlinks are probably being ignored! In a recent experiment I linked from a well established PR3 site to a new PR0 website and watched it quickly jump up the search results. But, when I put the backlink on more of the thousands of pages on the PR3 site, the PR0 site fell back down the results to lower than when I started.
This is an obvious sign that Google does not give benefit to anything approaching site wide backlinks and if you have placed your link on the footer, it is appearing on every page of the site. And it might even be a brand new website, so little to no benefit to you.
But my experiment continued to blocking the non home page links to see what would happen then and what I noticed was that the position of the PR0 website slowly went back up, practically reaching the position it had been at before I put the backlinks web site wide. Not quite there, but then it possibly will take quite a while for Google to work out that some of the deeper inner pages should be ignored.
So, if you are building themes for Search engine optimisation purposes what do you need to do to be certain that the links are counting? Well, the answer is to not be too greedy and there are two options.
The first is to use the WordPress is_front_page function to detect whether the footer is being displayed on the front page and then, if it is, to display the link. This way your backlink merely ever appears on the one page of the site.
However, this does not get the best results for traffic. If the website is receiving visitors then some of these may like your work and also want to download a free theme. For these people you need to be displaying the backlink on every page.
So my preferred method, though it might not quite work so well on the search engines, is to negate the process. Always display the backlink on every page through the footer, but if it is not the front page, then add rel="nofollow" to the backlink. This way you are telling Google to ignore the web site wide aspect of the backlink, whilst getting the benefit of the home page presence (and perhaps the page with the highest page rank) and also allowing further traffic to discover your work.
A little complicated, but hopefully the best solution all around!
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