Will search engines penalize for having same WP theme as my competitor for same slot?

Hello I am having a site which is having the same wordpress theme as another competitor vying for 1st rank for the same search term.I want to know is it a wise option to go for another wordpress theme as my competitor?Or is it OK if me and he uses the same wordpress theme?

 

It makes absolutely no difference at all; even if you have the same Wordpress theme there are going to differences in the coding anyway based on how much you customise the theme, which widgets & plugins you use etc

 

They are not looking at styling when ranking your site. They are looking at the content. So as the previous poster said, it makes no difference.

 

Theme does not matter,its a quality of your backlinks which you must spend time on.

 

SEs are looking more often to your sitemap.xml than to your plain html.
you don't need to change your WP template, unless you're copying your competitor content.

 

yeah as long as the content is original it should'nt make a difference

 

Since you have the same theme as your competitor you can use it to your advantage. As all posters above have denied the fact that having the same theme will cause any issues which is very much true, you can beat your competitor in on-page seo.

Study his Keyword placements, since the structure of the pages would be the same for both, place your keywords in a more prominent position and keep a keyword density alongwith the number of keywords within the <b>, <em>, <u> and <h1>/<h2> tags higher than him. If your On-page seo is better than his, it will give a boost to your Off-page Seo and you can outperform him with comparatively less link building.

 

You won't be penalized. And hopefully you can leverage some extra traffic if a few visitors remember the design and don't realize that they are on a different URL then they expected

 

Having the same theme won't make a difference, it's the content that matters.

 

For the most part the replies you have received are correct. Keep in mind though that they are forgetting that many themes have some similar content in the footer, header, and other areas which Google will flag as duplicate content. Your best bet is to customize any text that came with the theme and add lots of unique content to your site. Follow these guidelines and you shouldn't have any problems. Also, you may want to check the footer links that came with the theme and make sure they don't link to any questionable websites. Perhaps I'm leaning toward the "overly anal" stance on this issue, but better safe than sorry.

 

Again echoing what other people are saying it makes no difference as long as your content is different. Avoid free themes that are often stuffed with links. I would recommend using thesis theme that is highly customisable.

 

Actually I am competing for the same content,but I will write it in a different way,just by changing the header and the content which I am posting is video content which I myself makes which is different from what he makes by himself.So I think I will do fine with it provided I change the header of each individual posts,am I right?

 

This is actually a pretty good question. I wouldn't think so since you can customize everything like title, keywords, and everything. But your website will get confused with your competitors.

 

I think it's not a big problem if you are in same theme. If you are using free templates, then it's normal that you and your competitor are same theme. You can have problem if you are also same in body post.

 

when a free theme is designed, it gets distributed to the free theme sites. some good free themes are posted on wordpress site itself and hundreds, sometimes even thousands of people usethe same theme based on popularity. same goes for html/css templates as well where lots of people use the same template. you will not get penalized for using a free template or theme, even if your competitor is using it