Link Building through Word Press Theme Sponsorship: A Good Idea?
Article by DoshDosh available at http://www.doshdosh.com/.
wordpress.jpgWhile writing my previous article on Adsense Wordpress templates, I came across a website which offered an opportunity to sponsor various Wordpress templates. This meant that you could easily buy a footer link that will be placed next to the author credit link on a brand new Wordpress template .
As the Wordpress theme gets released, promoted and downloaded by other users, the link to your website (which you paid for) will show up on other Wordpress blogs.
As everyone knows, Wordpress themes are notorious for their ability to send massive amounts of links back to the theme designer’s website. I’ve already written about how Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme contributed immensely to the link popularity of Tubetorial, his other side project.
If you don’t have the technical skills needed to create a Wordpress theme, you’ll still stand a chance of having a footer link to your website in thousands of blogs through a successful theme sponsorship.
What are the benefits of sponsoring a Wordpress Theme?
Theme sponsorship can be an effective method of link building that may help your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking because you have the option of choosing the specific anchor text to use for your link.
This can be a long-term link building strategy that helps you to increase your keyword rankings, which means a lot more search engine visitors to your website and higher ad earnings as well as product/service sales.
Successful theme sponsorship may also help you to rapidly increase your website’s Google Page Rank, because it will receive a large volume of one way incoming links, each with a certain amount of PR and authority.
While nobody knows for sure how Google calculates its Page Rank algorithm, we can assume with some level of certainty that a large variety of incoming links with PR can help to positively benefit any website’s Page Rank.
An Example of a Sponsored Word Press Theme
All (or most) of the themes from Thomas Silkjaer aka the Undersigned, a popular Wordpress theme/plugin creator, feature sponsored footer links.
Here are screenshots of a theme with a specific link to an advertiser site.
Note that you can find many live examples of blogs using his themes by running this specific Google search.
water11.jpg
waterscreen1.jpg
The white theme above is known as Water 1.1 and is one of the 10 most downloaded Wordpress themes (with over 22,000 downloads).
As a result of this theme sponsorship, there are literally thousands of blogs with sitewide links to a website that sells Poker Tables. A peek at Weber Poker Table’s backlinks with Yahoo Site Explorer confirms this.
Theme Sponsorship As Link Building Strategy
Most of the Wordpress theme designers I’ve come across are rather discreet about their sponsorship arrangements. However, I recently noticed that several webmasters have started explicitly pushing theme sponsorship as a link building strategy.
One of them is Themey, a website that openly promotes Wordpress Theme sponsorship and purchases. They are currently charging a minimum of $200 for a footer link in their Wordpress themes.
An excerpt from their website on the topic of theme sponsorship reads:
Wordpress 2.x has had over 1.2million downloads (and that statistic is from October 2006), whereas themes.wordpress.net has less than 1,200 themes for users to download (as of today, 21 January 2007).
Some very quick math shows that there is only one theme for every 1000 Wordpress downloads.
Imagine the cost of buying a text link ad on 1000 blogs?
Popular themes can easily achieve more than 1000 downloads in matter of weeks so I think the estimate above is reasonable. It should be noted that not all Wordpress users agree with the practice of leaving unrelated sponsor links in the blog template and some have actively taken steps to remove the advertiser links. I do however think the majority of Wordpress users either do not care about that extra link or are oblivious to its presence or function.
My personal take is that if you don’t like themes with sponsored links, you shouldn’t use the theme. This is because using it and removing the sponsored link might not cohere with the designer’s stipulated copyright regulations.