What does encrypted footer mean?

I've seen that in WP templates...

 

Means that the footer cannot be changed due to it being coded. It's not normal html.

 

Usually in reference to buying links on Wordpress Themes.
The footer is encrypted, so that when people download it, they have difficulty removing the "sponsored links" before using the theme on their blogs.

Almost all encrypted footers can be easily bypassed by simply installing the theme, right click page, then "view source".

 

Ah...is that all there is to remove the so-called encrypted footers?

 

Yeah, just copy/paste the footer section of html from "view source" into your theme's footer.php file, change it, upload it, and you should be good to go.

The only time this doesn't work is if the theme has some essential php coding in the footer that is required for the theme to run properly, but the large majority of themes don't do this.

 

Thanks for the tip. Are you sure that this will work?

 

Thats only if you don't want somebody to edit your Paid links at Footer

 

About 90% of the time, this will work.
Don't take my word for it. Just test it out and see.
If it doesn't work, then you got a theme that falls in that 10% that doesn't work with this process.

Either get a different theme or find another way to decode it.

 

How is this done ?
If this is done how google gets about the sponsor links ?

 

The footer.php is encrypted, not the HTML being outputted to the browser/spider.

 

Exactly as live-cms says.

The encrypted footer is decrypted on the server side.
It then spits out the HTML for your browser to read.

When you right click the page and click "view source", you will be able to see the raw HTML source code after it has been decrypted.

You just copy/paste this footer section of the source code into your footer and you're good to go.