Beware the Free WordPress Theme

July 18th, 2007 · 11 Comments

Yet more evidence that the business of blogging is nothing less than war, and you need to be prepared to defend yourself.

I just ran across a scary post at www.bracingyourbrand.com that took me back a couple of steps. Robert Kingston, the author of that site, had recently started using a new WordPress theme.

The problem is, he discovered that the theme had placed hidden links to sites he’d rather not have his blog associated with throughout his site. The theme used style="display: none;" attributes to hide links to all sorts of unsavory sites. This attribute keeps the links from showing up visually, but they are still picked up by the search engines. It turns out that the code to place those links in the footer of the theme was probably inserted by some third party along the line (it isn’t in the original code of the theme), not the original authors.

The reason this is a problem is that it violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines we discussed in an earlier post, which could end up resulting in him being penalized in the indexing process (not to mention the association with the questionable sites!).

In his post, Robert mentions a Firefox plugin that you can use to check your site for these types off issues. And I’m on the lookout for a WordPress plugin or other tool that can check your site for this type of trickery automatically. If you’re using a free theme or plugins from sources that you’re not certain of, I’d recommend you check out Roberts post and use the plugin he recommends to check over your site.

And as with all shareware or open source software–you should always attempt to download the theme from the original source if possible to minimize the chances that it’s been modified by someone else.

Unfortunately, "You Get What You Pay For" turns out to be true more often than not…

Update: Read Beware the Free WordPress Theme Revisited to see what was really going on here.

Update 2: As of Aug 6, 2007, it looks like templatesbrowser.com has at least temporarily ceased operations, or moved on to easier hunting.

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Tags: Art of (Blog) War · Blogging Tips · SEO

11 responses so far ↓

1 Jason // Jul 18, 2007 at 7:37 pm

Thanks for the warning. Have you actually seen these types of themes at WordPress.org theme directory?
2 nails // Jul 19, 2007 at 2:01 pm

garrr, I never even thought to look for ‘hidden’ links. Note taken.
3 Jason // Jul 19, 2007 at 4:32 pm

Any takers?
4 Rob Kingston // Jul 19, 2007 at 7:28 pm
5 Zen Zoomie // Jul 19, 2007 at 9:30 pm

Hi Jason,

After talking with Robert some more about it, we think that in this case the code was probably inserted by a third party before the file was placed on a download site. He can’t remember for sure where he got it. I checked all of the themes I’ve downloaded from Wordpress’s themes directory, and they were all clean–no problems. Best thing to do is to grab a copy of the Firefox plugin that Robert referenced and check any new theme you get before you actually start using it.

Cheers,

ZZ
6 Zen Zoomie // Jul 19, 2007 at 10:00 pm

@Rob, thanks for dropping by, and thanks for putting up a copy of the original code for us to look at.

P.S. I fixed the link to your article–not sure why it didn’t work (it was the trackback link cut & pasted from your site), but it should be fine now.

ZZ
7 Rob Kingston // Jul 20, 2007 at 3:35 am

Cheers Zen,

Yeah, I’m not sure why either… It must be something to do with how much I’m fiddling with my site.

There’s always something you can tweak/test!
8 Beware the Free WordPress Theme - Revisited // Jul 20, 2007 at 6:30 am

[…] Wednesday, I talked about a sneaky trick that some black hat search engine marketers are resorting to. If you didn’t read that article, you should. But in the meantime, I’ll catch you up. […]
9 Jason // Jul 20, 2007 at 3:17 pm

“After talking with Robert some more about it, we think that in this case the code was probably inserted by a third party before the file was placed on a download site. He can’t remember for sure where he got it.”

Aha. Thanks Zen and Rob.
10 Billy // Aug 6, 2007 at 7:57 am

This is pretty dubious trickery by the free blog templates. I am certain that the free templates offered by wordpress.org have been checked before being made available to its users, or its users would have found the hidden links in them as well.
11 Zen Zoomie // Aug 6, 2007 at 10:51 pm

Let’s hope the WordPress hosted themes are more trustworth in general. Unfortunately, not everyone doing this type of thing isn’t quite as obvious about it as the guys at templatesbrowser.com were. I noticed that their website, interestingly, no longer appears to be functioning as of today. Hopefully they’re gone, but more likely just moved on to somewhere else.

The funny thing is, if they had been above board with the whole thing, most people would be more than happy to host an ad at the bottom of their blog in exchange for the service offered. But instead they hid the links from users and implemented it in a way that violated Google’s guidelines and could end up getting websites blocked form Google’s results.

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