Link Building through Word Press Theme Sponsorship: A Good Idea?
While 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.
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.
Making Money with Word Press Themes
From the perspective of a website designer, Wordpress themes can provide you with a relatively decent source of side income. Let’s suppose you produce one Wordpress theme a week and charge $150 for a link. You’ll make around $600 a month for your efforts.
Judging from the recent theme sales in various webmaster forums, one can safely assume that there is a strong demand for Wordpress theme sponsorship.
Perhaps we can assume that there is a steady market of webmasters out there who view theme sponsorship as a viable long term link building tactic.
Where can you find Wordpress Themes to sponsor?
If you’re interested in getting your link in a Wordpress theme, I would suggest privately contacting specific Wordpress Theme designers and asking if they could create a custom designed template that allows you to sponsor a specific link.
Another alternative is to browse around the various Wordpress Theme websites and email specific theme authors who have a history of allowing sponsored footer links in their theme.
Occasionally, theme authors will also hold theme sponsor auctions in various webmaster forums and you might want to visit Digital Point Forums if you’re interested in participating in a theme sponsor auction.
Your thoughts on Theme Sponsorship and Link Building.
Three questions I’ll like to ask all SEO enthusiasts/experts, Wordpress bloggers and everyone else out there:
- Do you think theme sponsorship is an effective and beneficial long term link building strategy?
- Correspondingly, do you think that Wordpress theme authors should or should not sell sponsored footer links?
- Will you remove a sponsored link if you are using or plan to use a sponsored Wordpress theme?
I think it is a good program if you just want linkbacks. It isn’t effective though for relative linkbacks though, neaning on topic.
I am unsure if this is an effective method over the long run, but for now. It does seem to grow a page rank.
I can’t say this really appeals to me. For the designer it is a great way to get links that are legitimate for his work. Other than that, sponsoring links is just gaming the search engines. It’s not worth the money, IMO, and it makes your site look spammy when people dig deeper as to why you have so many links pointing toward your site.
you’ve given me something to think about as my theme is in the top 10 on Wordpress and is getting roughly 1000 new downloads a month.
I’m not sure of the logic of a one-off payment per theme as that doesn’t seem fair when more links are created every month. A monthly payment would be fairer.
I’m going to setup an auction for a one-month listing on digital points to see what kind of response I get.
What an excellent Idea!. This would make the already excellent Wordpress Themes arena to explode with more professional ones.
Everton, You MUST!. I am a fan of your theme.
I agree with Everton. Why would somebody want to buy that slot. It might make our theme look a bit unprofessional.
From the SEO point of view, most search bots crawl at max 3/4 of the page. It’s quite hard to get them till the footer
maki,nice ideas, but i don’t think so this can be the best ideas, since it’s not really professional to sell that slot to third party. If this is for the owner’s SEO purpose, then it will work great!
But this consider possible to make money, not a best choice. I recently also play with wordpress, wish to learn from you, what do you think maki?
That’s a real good ideea. Even though I think the quality of the backlinks will be poor (experienced users will most likely remove the link), quantity still matters a little bit.
I think this is a creative way to bring sponsorship and ads in place most did not think of before. Free is good, but money has to come in from somewhere.
To answer your questions:
1 : I think it depends on the theme and the people downloading it. If both are targeted, yes, it can be a long term strategy. People may start editing themes slowly to remove sponsorship links, though.
2 : I think WordPress theme authors can do whatever they like as long as it’s not at the expense of other’s comfort. Theme authors can add sponsor links if they want and even say that a sponsor link can be removed from public pages but not from theme pages when logged in as an admin.
3 : I would personally like to remove a sponsor link in a theme I download, though I would be willing to keep the link visible when logged in as an admin.
Really usefull article , but I think that link building might be done without spending money
I noticed that recently when I wrote this post about someone who made it into the top 100 of Technorati by putting out lots of free wordpress themes.
I think sponsoring a theme is certainly worth considering.
Interesting Article. Modifying a theme isn’t difficult. If one is worried about moral implications why not just learn to convert themes to Wordpress, add a link for one of your own websites, attach a license asking the user to leave the link in (be polite), and who knows what can happen. But yes. Paying is like buying links which Google considers a big NO NO. So I wouldn’t suggest it.
Zeeshan, you have an interesting point. I have a thought though: We should make decisions based on what we think is right for us and others, and not things we think Google may dislike.
Do you think in the online world, such a mentality can survive?
We made theme for WP. But how to upload it? They didn’t answer to contact form !
Good idea, I haven’t thought of that.
Need to make my own template, get the sponsor and share it.
But wouldn’t this at some point be considered by search engines and google in particular as unnatural link growth? Especially since all of the links will be using same anchor text.
Thanks for this useful post and find it very informative.
good:What an excellent Idea!. This would make the already excellent Wordpress Themes arena to explode with more professional ones. Everton, You MUST!. I am a fan of your theme.
I personally don’t remove sponsor links from themes I use. Sponsorship is a good deal for the Wordpress community, because the themes get to stay free.
As far as the benefits of being a sponsor, having a lot of backlinks is nice for PR purposes, but I’m not convinced that relevancy is helped unless you happen to get lucky and a site on a similar topic to yours uses the theme.
But it’s probably worth trying at least once to see what the results are.
Jay
Hi..This is kranthi..
i’m not understanding this themes..
i well know abt blogger account and adscene account..
but where this wordexpress themes to be upload..
please tell me..completely.
ragards
kranthikumar
When i started reading all the comments “wow what a great idea” i thought this post was written in 2005
I can’t believe so many people have no clue about sponsoring themes. This was being done in 2001/2002 with phpBB themes etc.
Hmm… I found here some interesting opinions and suggetions, I would rather stick to 70%/30% scheme… 70% – for link exchange/building and 30% – buy links, those links you wont be able to get by exchanges. Trusted sites with strong reputation over internet… Old ones, related to your niche with strong/high PR and millions of inbound backlinks… that is how it works!