Unnatural Linking Using Webdsite Themes

[seohive-222720]

I am working on a website that last year received an email from Google via webmaster tools talking about the linking profile.  The email suggested that the website had unnatural activity (links) and that the webmaster needed to investigate before filing for a reconsideration.

After having looked at the link profile using OSE, it was easy to see the problem.  Thousands of inbound links with the exact anchor text.

Here is the BIG problem.

The tactics used by the unamed SEO agency prior to me were to embed links in to the footer of web themes? At this stage it is unclear as to where you can downlaod or purchase the web themes but it's obvious that the problem is simply going to escalate.

The domain in question is www.teamtactics.co.uk

Any thoughts on the above would be much appreciated - at this point I am trying to find the place were the themes are available for download.

Any ideas much appreciated.

shivun

[MarieHaynes]

This is a tough one.  I would attack it initially like any other unnatural links project.  Contact each of the sites linking to you via the footer code and ask them to remove or nofollow it.  Then, document your attempts and communicate your efforts to Google.

But, the problem is that if the free templates are still available for download then you'll get more of these and could get penalized again.

I don't think it would be that hard to find these sites offering the free downloads though.  According to ahrefs you've got 850 domains linking to you.  If you know the anchor text used in these footers, you can narrow it down even more.  Provided the sites hosting the free downloads have a demo version of the site then they'll be on that backlink list.  If they don't have a demo version, there still has to be a way to do a Google search for the name of the template to find these hosts.

Then, get them to remove the template.  If they don't, file a DMCA takedown request or speak to a lawyer about getting a letter written to get them to remove it.

[seohive-222720]

HI William

Unfortunetly the website has links coming inbound from many websites now so its a problem that is only going to grow.  In terms of SEO and tactics, this is a really bad strategy that has been conducted by a well known SEO agency who I won't name.

The objective is to find the source of the word press theme. Ive already contacted many of the website owners that are using the theme and are awaiting a call back.

[Robert_G]

Getting backlinks from sponsoring templates/themes is not the right way of doing it. People pay theme creators to include a link to their website. Other people use those themes, so you'll end up with thousands of backlinks with the same anchor text.

A good link is a link from one single page, preferably on the same niche.

What you can do at this point, is to remove all those "sponsored by", "created by" links.

Use Opensiteexplorer to analyze your website and check out who's linking to you using site wide links.

Eg.:

This theme is brought to you by Corporate Team Building Events, Fixed rate bonds rates on: http://vanzandtnews.com/

[SpokeHQ]

Wow... I'm not sure what the SEO strategy for this is, if there even is one.

If they were all coming from one domain (such as the web theme was being sold for use on their hosted sites), you could edit .htaccess to block links from that domain, but I doubt if that's the case.

As far as I know, the solution to this might be legal. If you can verifiably show that these links are damaging to your client's business, a competent lawyer could probably force them to make a reasonable effort to remove the links (provide an update web theme without the links to anyone who purchased that theme). Might not help, though.