You might want to think that over for a moment, if you do business on the WWW, you are indeed a slave, a yes man and googles biatch. We all are, im comfortable with it and accept it, il be googles bitch if it makes me money, its better than working in a factory. Like oasis once said Roll with it, take your time lol
speaking of someone's bitch, i'm listening to one right now. p0w! @discover: The whole nofollow thing never came to mind. I guess that's just how it goes for someone like me who markets for wants traffic and don't concern myself with gaygle's flawed algo.
instead of the 4 link ads... we could use 4 of these In this way, we could get also PR & traffic, but not SERP ranking improvement. And I think Google will "allow" that... Am I wrong ?
There are ways to be successful in life without bending over to anyone, and if the owners of Google once said "Build a site as if Google didn't exist" and one of their employees says "Do what you can to help Google when building a site" then that makes me wonder.
I agree, i could try business offline but it would be more expensive for me to start and not as easy as online. The ideal part of me see google as the government and the mind control machine. But realistically i conform in order to survive, ive done my fair share of moaning about them in the past. I agree with the contradictions in the statements that they make, its frustrating, but i see no way around them.
The script in my sig actually made a point of not sponsoring templates even though it probably lost us a lot of business, we try to learn from others mistakes and in the case of template sponsorship that was one of them. The problem with sponsored templates is that the also invariably create duplicate sites.
Fair enough, and SEO doesn't seem to be your line of business, so I realize you go with the flow which you should. I however see too much hypocricy having been in SEO for about 8 years and have a hard time accepting spokespersons saying one thing today and contradicting it tomorrow. How is sponsoring a wordpress theme any different from setting people up with free blogs? Use www.activerain.com for example. You blog and it gets their network promoted. They get a huge SEO benefit from it. Others get penalized for doing the exact same thing, not giving people free blogs, but a free template that they have paid for. If this is not going to benefit you with rankings, fine, but how in the world can I be the only one having a problem with Google telling me I cannot market my site in a natural way or I'm going to be penalized?
What are you asking me for? I'm only going with reading from past experience ref: the template sponsoring that went on with a certain script, if you want answers go ask Google why they chose to penalize this, I'm sure we'd all like to know. If there is or was any penalizations blame the ones who caused it not the ones who write about it. And rest assured it isn't just you who has problems with Google playing big brother.
YES. SPONSORING WORDPRESS THEMES DOES GET YOU PENALISED IN GOOGLE http://www.google.com/search?q=frui...s=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a
Call me stupid if you want but what was the point of that reference Mikey? Fruity directory never showed?
Yep, I think that was the point. Google seems to hunt down Mikey's projects like terrorists. Except they take him out when they get the chance (unlike the US army) As I've said all along, perhaps it's not how you sell it, but how you market it.
Oh shit, 2 days ago your were on the first page for "Health Directory" and in top 3 for other competitive keywords. Mike, I am so sorry for you. After ZL, FD also gets penalised. But, I am curious about something... about a test. Do this if you like ... 1) buy yourself fruity-directory.com for example 2) move the directory to that domain 3) do a permanent redirect from htaccess or DNS. I wonder what will happend with the new domain. You sponsored A LOT of themes, and your backlinks were growing like hell daily. Maybe this you got penalised, soooo many backlinks in short period of time. I don't think you wouldn't be penalised now if you would have sponsored only half of those huge number of WP themes. But anyway, do this test please. an0n mentioned a while ago about this happening... redirecting a hardly backlinked & penalised domain to another, will make the new one strong and with high PR as well. Once again, sorry UPDATE: One the second page, mygreencorner.com is ranking 21 for the "fruity directory" keywords... They also sponsorised WP themes as hell in the begining, and now they are ranking so high for highly competitve keywords like "business directory" , "free directory" , etc. Now it seems it is like alivedirectory.com is the good periods. It is ranking for a lot of keywords.. The irony, is the fact that now, they pretend they deliver good SEO solutions for you, and could bring you up, just like they did. CRAP! http://www.mygreencorner.com/tools.php So, as a conclusion, for some it works, for some not. My advice, do not exaggerate, doesn't matter what you do !
MGC am not sponsoring any theme. I and my collabs are designing the themes. It's not against G's tos to design and release themes for free. Check http://www.freecsstemplates.org/, they are doing the same thing. Designing and releasing free templates is not a form of SERP manipulation. Also, I have created a section where everybody can upload their theme for free. I am not modifying the footer links in any way like wpthemesfree.com does. I do offer the opportunity to my customers to sponsor themes, but this is other business. Anyway, I see that all your directories in your sig are using a sponsored template. How about that? If it weren't for people like me and other designers that release free theme out there, you would now still have the bulk phpld on your directories.
For anyone who has/does sponsor wordpress or other themes/templates to promote a directory or sometimes another site, can you say at what rate you were doing it? Without having tried it before myself i would guess thats its pretty safe to do slow and steady, but not in the sense of a sponsoring campaign and not for a brand new site. Where do you believe the danger lies? if you can hint at the amounts that you sponsored and beyond that the amounts of websites where the themes would be made available. Also have/were you sponsoring themes that would result in very non relevant blog/sites being setup with your resulting sponsored link? As i think it would be better (where possible) to sponsor a webmaster theme for a webmaster site of course, and a pet theme for a site you have about dogs. Also were the shared sponsor links relevant to yours within the themes or were you sharing the space with non relevant sponsor links? I think they average between 2-4 links per theme? something like that.
To answer your question - I sponsored two templates last year. At that time Google did not have a problem with template sponsorships.
I'm not sure, but I think alive and aviva directory did a lot of template sponsoring before they got banned / downgraded.
Yes I was aware of that and think that did a lot of damage, I did read something on wordpress themes causing grief somewhere but not all. Just a few that took the p***
tbh I cant believe anyone is actually still using this method to improve serps wasnt this part of the reason directory owners were penalised in the first place?