Wordpress.org decided to kill sponsored Wordpress Themes some time ago.
But now it seems that even a bigger player in the internet game is going after sponsored themes.
It’s google and mister Matt Cutts himself that going after theme sponsors.
This kinda doesn’t make any sense to me. Links are, by Google’s definition, something that you get for unique content or providing a useful service. And if someone uses your theme, you are obviously providing him with a free, useful service!
But well, why am I reffering myself to this subject?
Get your personal -60 Rank Slap! Sponsor a theme…
It seems that the seo’s guys from site-seo.co.uk had been buying text links on footers of sponsored themes with “Garden Furniture” for their client farawayfurniture.co.uk as anchor text.
But it seems that those seo guys were too successful. They started sponsoring several themes and their client started having pretty nice SERP’s.
But Google eventually did recognize that there was some link-gaming going on for that site. And since then those guys have lost a lot positions in their SERP’s. In fact, they lost nearly all their traffic by losing 40-60 positions on average.
Mister Matt Cutts himself mentioned in that Google Groups Message Board Thread that the best thing they can do, is to ask each webmaster to remove their links and then apply for a re-inclusion at google.
[...] I doubt you really want pages like
www.fuckingfilthy.com/filthy-hardcore/amateur-black-teen-sex-f…
having sponsored links to your furniture site anyway. It’s definitely
possible to extricate your site, but I would make an effort to contact
the sites with your sponsored links and request that they remove the
links, and then do a reconsideration request. Maybe in the text of
your reconsideration request, I’d include a pointer to this thread as
well. [...]
C’mon Matt, it is probably a more difficult task to get a spam blogger to change something on his dumped spam blog than to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So did Google, in fact, not only take a look at the footer links, but also at who had those links?
One thing concerns me even more: Doesn’t Google tell us that they don’t care a lot about who links to you?
If Google starts looking at this fact, its plain easy to destroy a competitors site by just buying links on themes you know that will do very well. Or how about just setting up 1000s of spam blogs, all of them with a link to your competitor? And of course after that you go after them by snitching about them at Google.
C’mon, this is plain stupid!
It is obviously, just a failure of Google to detect those links.
Why cant those guys just detect footer links, maybe even rate them down? Why do they have to kill the free-themes scene just because they can’t recognize a single method of getting quality links?…
