Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

A few weeks ago, I wrote a couple of articles about the appearance of ‘hacked’ WordPress themes. Some Black Hat SEO practitioners have modified legitimate WordPress themes, plugins, and other software by adding hidden links to them and making the tampered version available for download. Although the distributor I highlighted in my original article (templatesbrowser.com) has long-sense packed up and moved on, hidden links in WordPress themes are still a very real problem.

Court Tuttle, who runs a free WordPress theme search engine optimization service at his blog, is still reporting that about half of the themes he reviews are crammed full of spammy hidden links.

The principal reason that you should be wary of hidden links is that they can get you banned or otherwise penalized by Google.

Here’s what Google has to say about the practice of using hidden text and links.

The best way to avoid this problem is to only download your WordPress themes and other software from an original, trustworthy source. Avoid third-party theme repositories unless you’re certain they’re reputable. And if you’re not sure of the trustworthiness of a new theme, follow Court’s advice from his post and take the time to manually review the code for hidden links or unfamiliar links yourself.