Just posted this on Sphinn after reading about the possibility of a wordpress theme sponsorship getting your directory flagged. Here are my thoughts on Jeff's post.
Im unsure, i think sponsoring a few accross a few of your sites could be ok, but if your going hard at it, sponsoring huge amounts and doing that for all your sites it could create a problem. But i have no idea really, as always there are other factors, so if someone did get penalised, would it be from the sponsorship or something else? Hard to know for sure.
Sponsoring themes with the intent of manipulating page rank will get you penalized or banned by Google.
How to distinguish one from the other. Maybe some use sponsorship as a form of marketing and not to manipulate page rank. How could anyone know if its marketing, or manipulation or [insert conspiracy theory]. I guess gaygle just picks and chooses with malice?
My point exactly, looking at my backlinks you can see a lot of blogs like this one using the theme and the amount of traffic from them all is pretty substantial. If Google doesn't want me sponsoring a template to count as a factor when ranking my site, why not just implement a change in the algorithm discounting all sponsor links? Why would anyone say no to an extra 900-2,000 uniques a day from sponsoring just one template because Google cannot figure out what is what?
I previously have read the post where Matt Cutt's essentially agreed that sponsoring Wordpress themes could be an issue. But I think getting penalized for sponsoring themes is extremely rare. As Webmasters, we will go through our site/backlinks with a fine tooth comb if our site appears to be penalized. We have a tendency to look at every detail and think the worst. I honestly think in many cases it was something other then a theme sponsorship that triggered a loss in SERPS. Nobody knows this for sure except for Google. Because their algorithm is flawed in regards to detecting paid/sponsored links. Instead they want us to supplement their algorithm with nofollow links and they solicit Webmasters to be paid link policemen. It's possible that someone in your niche did not like your rankings and decided to report you. Sponsoring any theme would make it much easier for a Google employee to look at the submitted complaint and apply a hand edit to your site. Google's stance on this would be simple. If you want to sponsor Wordpress themes, add rel=nofollow. Not that I agree with this, but that's what they always say... If you sponsor a popular theme, you can pick up quite a few backlinks. And its possible that these backlinks can make up a large percentage of your backlink profile. That would concern me the most. But in all honesty, I think footer links on any site are under the microscope. They are well out of the view of visitors, which makes them the perfect spot to place paid links at. And if there are a number of unrelated niche links clustered together, that makes it all the more obvious. Originally when you sponsor a theme, there may be around 2-4 footer links in the cluster. But what happens when these blog owners decide to sell links? Some sell them in the sidebar/blogroll while others stuff them in the footer. Over time, those 2-4 original footer links can become 10-20 footer links in some blogs. This raises a red flag, which may be reviewed by a Google employee. Then that Google employee may choose to discount or penalize for all the links in the footer. That's the problem with adding a sponsored footer link to themes. What starts out as something that is hard to detect can quickly grow into a large spammy set of footer links... Good luck with your site.
Yes, it has been noted before that such sponsorships can get a site penalised in Google, historically the Alive and Aviva directories come to mind, and more recently, as discussed previously, Mikey's zorg directories may well have been influenced by the same sort of penalty. Matt Cutts did make a point of this, for those of you interested, his blog post can be found here. However, I believe if you keep it under control, perhaps a few sponsorships on relatively related blogs, it can work, but not always. For example, in December of last year I decided I'd have a try with it. On a very small side project I decided I'd try get it to rank top 10 for a particular high-traffic keyword simply from sponsorships on wordress themes, html themes, phpbb skins, anything I could sponsor and get a lot of links back....and it worked for around 5 months. The site bombed at the start of May 2008 but in the last week or so has come back to the top of the rankings once again. This site was receiving around 100 uniques a day before I started sponsoring themes, from which traffic has risen ten-fold. (I haven't done any work on this site other than sponsorship links) Moreover, a more risky scenario was from Shyboy's UK garden furniture website. He has so far accumulated almost 60,000 backlinks, with a major percentage of them paid links, sponsorship links, etc, especially through WordPress themes - yet his site had the same issue as mine - dived for around a month then reappeared back on top within the first half of this year. What are your thoughts on that one?
use nofollow if it is for advertising or marketing sites also using sponsored anchors such as Premium Web Directory are not using advertising as their motivation for a sponsored link
Why would we have to use an attribute to help Google do their work? And btw. my anchor was "Cool Sites" and it didn't seem to protect me from being penalized.
they dont owe it to you to do things the way you want if you want to be in the google index do as they say
This is 2 too hard to say. Imagine the following scenario... I will sponsor few WP themes for a website that I do not own. Will Google penalise that site ? I would be glad... How do you know if this is not the competition ?
I think it is like this... If you website is quite new... or... more than 50% of your links are from WP themes sponsorships...you will get penised! as some said in here I mean, it is obvious that if most of your backlinks are from different blogs, with different IPs & every indexed page of that blog poiting to you... Also, in the directory world, when Google is the ultimate killer... sponsoring a WP theme for backlinks... could be the reason they expect to smash you, if you directory is a good, quality one, not selling links from sidewide, etc. I don't know what to say..but I do know that Kahuki Directory sure did sponsor WP themes to get that PR6 with PR5 inner pages... and don't tell me the story about unique content & quality stuff because for Kahuki this does not applies
As Spider Man said, Matt Cutts advised against it. Its a form of SERP manipulation on a large scale. As google says, if you did it for traffic use nofollow. wpthemesfree.com were recently penalised like directories were as they stuffing their link and anchor text into every theme on their site.
hahaha, nice one! I'm loughing...but dunno if it is my laugh. I think with directories...Yahoo will be our daddy. Because Google tries to make us swallow AdWords Anyway, REP+ added