PageRank, Technorati, and Free WordPress Themes

OK, first of all I want to preface this by saying that I have never, and will never try to game any ranking system. OOO — take that back, I did include sponsored links in some of my first free WordPress themes, but other than that, I’ve never tried to game a ranking engine. AND, I would never recommend you doing so either.

However, one of the very fortunate side effects of releasing free WordPress themesis that you get a killer amount of backlinks for your trouble.

And to be honest, I don’t really mind recognizing, and leveraging that fact to my benefit.

Always include two links in the footer

That’s right, as of right now, there is no blowback for including a link to the support page of the theme, along with your name as the author. This means that not only are you getting steady backlinks to the individual theme, but also backlinks to your homepage.

What is that so important?

OK, let’s say you’ve released 5 free themes. Each one of those themes contains a link to the support page for that theme. Let’s also say that you get an average of 200 backlinks per theme released.

Would you rather have 200 links to 5 different pages on your site, or 1000 links back to your homepage?

I’d personally rather have the latter. Why? The more backlinks to a single page, the higher that page’s PageRank will be. And the higher your pagerank, the more value Google places on your links, thus making your homepage a powerful and influential player in the keywork arena, and making your site much more valuable.

Yeah, it’s minor and a bit petty, but by including two links in the footer, you really do give yourself a distinct advantage on the web.

However, the second this becomes a no-no in the WordPress community, you should stop doing it. Just like with the sponsored theme controversy, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the fence if it becomes an issue. A single link is better than no traffic at all.

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