Sponsored WordPress Themes, a Thing of the Past?

Posted by Blonde Jon

March 7, 2008

A while back a huge link building craze hit the net. People started creating free WordPress themes for the sole purpose of link building. It seemed like nearly everyone was doing it. If you didn’t have the skills to create your own themes, you would pay someone else to create a theme for you. You would then proceed to place text links in the footer of these themes and then give them away for free. If a person ended up using your theme, you would get some link juice from their site. Does Google frown on this?

I used to be big into the sponsored themes myself. I’ve created at least 4 free themes, I even started a site where WP theme creators could submit there themes and end users could download them for free. I started getting tired of my site after seeing a lot of junky themes being submitted with sponsored links. I have seen some really nice themes come through, but a lot of them in my opinion are very cheesy looking. Anyways, I used to promote sponsored WP themes as a way of link building. But I just recently stumbled across a blog post that has made me change my mind on this practice. I’m going to work toward getting rid of my sponsored links on my free WP themes. (I never sold any of these sponsored links, they were always sites that I promoted.) I also would like to get rid of my Webpuffs.net site. Either sell it, or start over with something else. What is your opinion on Sponsored WP themes?

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