Hi guys, I friends of mine has offered for me to sponsor one of his latest templates. He gives them away for free and there very popular so I'm thinking about it. He has offered me to have a link in the footer or the sidebar under the friends section. Which one would be better for SERP's? Do footer links have as much authority? MAny Thanks HydroJohn
Definately the sidebar! I would imagine that Google has figured out that most blog themes have sponsored links in the footer & as such, has seriously discounted any authority they pass. Sidebar on the other hand, while still not the best place (in content is best), is a lot harder for the SE's to be 100% about. Lot's of people put legitimate links in the sidebar. I'll put my neck on the line and say that if anyone finds a good site & wants to link to it - nobody puts them in the footer!
Sidebar links are better. Footer links just scream manipulation because you are not providing the link for visitors.
Whilst sidebar's are evidently the best option SEO-wise, you also have to consider: how many of the links will actually stay online in the sidebar vs. how many links will actually stay online in the footer(obviously, I'm assuming it's a fairly discrete link)? I would tend to think that 0% of users of the template will actually keep the typical 'friends' box, whereas they're much more inclined to leave the footer alone (or not even notice it). Just some food for thought.
That's a very old method and we have many members in the forum whose sites were penalized for sponsoring too many themes / templates. Just do it carefully and make sure you are also building other type of links.
So If I sponsor a template each week and say each one is used by 30 sites will this be ok as I would only be building around 30 links each week as well as about 20 links by me link building.
Penalized?? I find that hard to believe. If I sponsor all of my competitors websites on a million templates, would that obliterate them from the SERPs? Unlikely. More likely is that the links were ignored.
I sponsor one template and then the template was used by a p*o*r*n site, and my site god de-index. so there is a small risk in that...
I also think sidebar links are better, we could just start from the users' visting experiences, sidebar is alwayas easy for them to link rather than the footer ones.
iam not sure about the side bar links - so cannot comment on that but here is my personal experience on footer template links - i bought one and the template bcame very viral.I got many links through it and have got over 3000 SITE WIDE links in 3 months - but what's the use??The page rank is still N/A because google detected that the links were automated.So decide yourself if you want to opt for these template links. Template links could be good if the links obtained are slow [you should make them look natural which is going to be hard] and anchor texts are varied - so think twice before making a decision.Hope this post was useful.
If these templates are so popular you should be carefull. You will potentially get thousands of "random" links to your site - by random I mean from non-related sites in any niche. This is cause for Google Spam concern!!! I wouldn't take that chance. Unless your domain is at least 5 years old with a couple of thousand backlinks, I would follow this approach instead: Build a Squidoo Page with unique and highly relevant content. Create outbound links to YOUR site from this Squidoo lens. Send all the Template links to your Squidoo lens. That way you still get immense benefit without running the risk of being penalized by Google.
add your links in footer is good choice, it will increase backlinks for future if many people download and use that theme. btw, could you add my links in footer to? LOL i am joke, do not take serious