Just wanted to let every one know what happened to me. I sponsored a couple travel wordpress themes and it seems the people that built the theme and sold me the link also sell the links to Drug/pharmacy related sites so every site that uses the theme now also links to my site and a pharmacy. And the worst part is, one of the themes, a travel theme, is used by a couple Marijuana sites. Now I have a bad neighborhood linking to my site. So be careful doing this everyone. I know sponsoring themes is a good way to build links over time but you never know who will be linking to you.
Sponsored theme means you pay someone to create a theme or you yourself create it and add links at the bottom and these themes are freely distributed for link building
OK, so the free WP themes that have the person's site linked at the bottom may also have been used for p0rn or stupid disfuction type sites. I am using a couple that have the link in the bottom, but so far not having issues ranking these sites quickly in Google. I guess I should check the site it links to out, etc... and make sure I am not linking to a bad neighborhood.
All the people in the Link Sales forum here looking for sponsors for there themes. For there price they will include your link in the footer of the theme. These are free themes that they submit to WP theme sites.
YES! Always check the free themes you use on your sites. Also, buying these sponsored links puts you in danger of bad neighborhoods linking to you also.
good find. I'll be checking into that one. I did wonder how long it would take for Google to put a stop to this. Any time people find new tricks/tactics it don't take long for them to find out and put a block on it.
This use to be a very effective method for picking up links, but it's become outdated as Google now frowns on it. It's still very commonly done, but isn't really all that effective any more (at least in my opinion).
Thanks for making us aware about that! Best to use clean theme from wordpress.org, it has now many varieties.
Ya, that's what I been doing. Less outbound links on the themes and don't have to worry about bad neighborhoods.
You never have control over who links to you anyway. That can't harm your site, you only get bad neighbourhood when YOU link out to bad sites. Google won't penalise you if THEY link to you. Otherwise one of your competitors could just buy a ton of bad links into your site to harm you.
I have read some articles that say otherwise but hopefully your right. You do have a good point. However, I still won't use them cause people sell those sponsored links to pharmacy and gambling (not all of them do) and that would be linking to bad neighborhoods. I guess you could ask them to make sure they won't but as mentioned above Google is on to it and don't like it so I guess I'll give up that idea. Thanks everyone for the discussion.