One of the methods usually described for building loads of incoming links is creating free themes for WordPress. But, you might be wasting your time! Read on to find out why and how to make them work.
If you have been reading about around Search engine optimisation and you are any good at designing and building web-sites, then you might be tempted to build some WordPress themes and make them publicly available for free. In return, you merely 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 backlinks.
But, these links are probably being ignored! In a recent experiment I linked from a well established PR3 website to a new PR0 site and watched it quickly jump up the search results. But, when I put the link on more of the thousands of pages on the PR3 site, the PR0 website 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 web site wide backlinks and if you have placed your link on the footer, it is appearing on every page of the website. And it could even be a brand new web site, 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, almost reaching the position it had been at before I put the links web site wide. Not quite there, but then it maybe 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 that the backlinks 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 backlink. This way your link just ever appears on the one page of the site.
However, this does not get the best results for traffic. If the weblog is receiving visitors then a few of these may like your work and also want to download a free theme. For these people you need to be displaying the link on every page.
So my preferred method, though it may not quite work so well on the search engines, is to negate the process. Always display the link 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 visitors to discover your work.
A little complicated, but hopefully the best solution all around!
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