Link Building with links in footer of Word Press Themes- Is This BLack Hat??

[DavidKonigsberg]

I See lots of free word press themes with links in footer like  Kids Headphones | Colombia Classifieds | Broadway Tickets Is this a valid white hat link building method? What if the theme looked like a particular industry and the links related to the industry would that be better?

[StalkerB]

Hi Joel,

you might want to consider reading questions more carefully before you reply.

This has nothing to do with removing links but building an distributing a theme with links in it!

[StalkerB]

If you put a base64 obfuscated link in the footer of your WordPress then I'll hunt you down and gut you like a fish ಠ_ಠ

The problem with those footer links is that they look spammy to both users and to search engines. Your theme could end up on all manner of sites with links to things they're irrelevant too, even if you try and skin the theme to be relevant.

Ultimately it's no longer a good way of building links, not least of all because people have such a huge choice of themes now even exceptional ones don't find many homes. Plus, even if you make a condition of using the theme, a lot of people are going to remove them.

As Riggz said it would only really not look bad if you were a design company, but it's been abused so much in the past I would think that they're almost entirely discounted by search engines.

[Riggz]

I've actually wondered the same thing... In that particular example, it seems they are injecting a wide variety of keywords into the footer, and it looks kind of fishy.

In general the only link I put in the footer (beside quick links to less visited areas of the website) would be credit for the web company in some way, "Site by X", 'Website Design by X", "Hosted on X CMS" (only using 1 of these per site).