I am a big fan of the Daily Blog Tips WordPress Themes. They are very easy to work with and customize and without even touching them they are pretty nice looking. At the bottom of each the page of each of my blogs there is a link back to the Daily Blog Tips Themes page where all of the themes are previewable and available for download.
A friend of mine has a business blog where she displays custom greeting, birthday, anniversary, etc. cards to highlight the kinds of cards she has designed and that you can buy. She has customized the theme over the last couple of years to make it look very nice. The theme is called Goodfell1s designed by Amsterdamn.
I was curious at what kind of changes she had made to the original, so I clicked the link at the bottom of her page to visit the designers page. Over in the right sidebar, down towards the bottom are links to a bunch of porn sites.
I’m not an SEO expert, but I know that I wouldn’t link to porn sites on my business blog. And as Google spiders my site and bounces over to the Amsterdamn site, I would prefer that the Google spiders didn’t find a bunch of porn sites over there either. I’m not sure how much Google would be concerned with something like this but better safe then sorry.
When you are using a freely available theme, you should check any of those links at the bottom and make sure they are sending people to a site that you approve of. And then you should check that link periodically to make sure that nothing major has changed on those sites linked to in your footer. If you do have concerns or just don’t want to constantly check, you have a few options.
Do you have any theme designers releasing free themes that you are particularly fond of?
Before modifying the themes, make sure to verify that there are no restrictions in doing so. A lot of designers use a Creative Commons license that says you must provide attribution. If so, you cannot delete the link, but you should be able to no follow it.
The amount of variety and creativity amongst theme designers releasing free themes is incredible and make it very attractive to us small people that don’t have major design budgets. Just be careful that the site your designer is linking to is something that you are comfortable linking to. Fortunately, that same variety and creativity also make it reasonable to find another similar theme from a designer that you could link to with a little more confidence.
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I had a theme that did this once. I would have never thought about checking out those links except that a fellow blogger shot me an email about it. I am glad that you brought this up.
I never even though of this potential problem. The link is fine, but thanks for the heads up.
I think the best way is to add a nofollow tag with the links or better yet, remove it. So far, I haven’t encountered yet a blog template with a porn link at the bottom. But you gave me an idea to always check the links at the footer. Thanks for that ;0
I just stumbled upon your site this morning and wanted to share a plugin for Wordpress that I found to help with this issue.
The plugin is called TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker). It checks for malicious code or hidden links, among other things. It doesn’t fix them, but alerts you to the fact that some outside the scope of Wordpress is there. This gives you the opportunity to discontinue using the theme, fix the issue, or contact the theme author and check with them about it.
You can get the plugin here:
http://builtbackwards.com/projects/tac/
Hope this helps!