Am using a nice theme that goes well with any site I do but I change the colors and header. My question is if google will penalize me for seeing the same code for many sites?
I doubt it would, a lot of sites use WP's default theme and I don't think they would be getting penalized. I'm pretty sure google and other SE's only evaluate visible text for duplicate content, not the html code itself.
the reason behind the answer would be do to your css, wp uses css to design the colors i would assume, most of the time the bots just leave the css code alone. I think though i have not used wp in a long time
Well, googlebot now reads CSS (as of the last week or so), but anyway there's no harm by using the same theme on all sites, but I just like to differentiate my sites to keep myself clear as to which one I'm looking at!
No it wont do any harm for you in google. I personally am using same WP themes on my websites. Althoguh there are many WP themes available, but there are only a few of them i liked, so i am using it on some of my websites and it has not created any problems, even got listed in DMOZ.
I think its been a little longer then that. I've seen GG pull out some CSS spam links and demonstrations a while ago.
I highly recommend NOT doing this. Find the one that works and stick to it. Perhaps change your category names if you are doing multiple sites on the same theme, but the structure of the URLs should not need to change from blog to blog.
I have always changed the permalink structure for my blogs, it did not create any problem with me so far. Or is there more to it? Please enlighten.
The main thing is that there is a certain convention to blog permalink URL structure that is optimal for SEO. If you find one that works, it makes sense to stick with it. Usually it is something like: yourdomain.whatever/categoryname(optional)/post_title.php That really works, and it's just about the only URL structure you'll need for a blog (IMHO).
Makes sense!! I have been experimenting too much with permalink, but i never check back which one is working better in SEs. yourdomain.whatever/categoryname(optional)/post_title.php This one seems to be a universal format, which i think is the best, looks organized as well.