IT Milk: entry

People are not inherently good; there are always selfish motives even for the most benevolent of deeds. So why would you think that free wordpress themes are really free? These theme designers do not knock out several hours of their own time to create free Wordpress themes for the benefit of the blogger community. Creating Wordpress themes and submitting them to these unmoderated directories is a lucrative business and an effective SEO technique.

Why Create A Wordpress Theme

The first reason is money. And the second reason is link building which can also eventually lead to money. Go to the official Wordpress theme repository and randomly test run a few themes. I guarantee that 2 out of 3 themes will have sponsored links or Google Adsense on them.

The popular thing to do several months ago was to make Myspace layouts and to virally spread them across that social networking community to gain a massive amount of backlinks to your websites. But inserting links on Wordpress themes instead is more effective because the content is obviously higher-quality than what exists on Myspace, and your link would be indexed on hundreds of posts within a single blog. Even if you make only a dollar or two every day from a single person using your Wordpress theme, imagine hundreds of people downloading and using your theme with your Adsense code on it.

Learn how to create your own Wordpress theme. It’s really easy.

Fix Advertisements On Your Wordpress Theme

Now, getting back on track, money is made from these themes by cleverly inserting Google Adsense contextual ads. A newbie blogger who downloads a theme like this may not care for these extra advertisements on the sidebar because it fills up blank space. But why should you write good content that brings in visitors while making bucks for the theme designer and leaving you with nothing at all?

If you find Wordpress themes that you like but has Adsense code on them, do not fret and just replace the publisher id with your own. First, you would have to . Next, open up the files in the theme and look for any instances of the google_ad_client property. This is where you replace their Adsense publisher id with your own. You can find your Adsense id by quickly creating your sample code for Adsense for Content inside the Adsense Setup page.

The other option is to delete all instances of Adsense code on the theme. But then you would be eliminating an easy method of making money with your blog, which would be… stupid.

Fix Spam Links On Your Wordpress Theme

There are two types of links that theme developers can place on their theme: a) a link to their own website with a message like “theme by XXX” or b) sponsored links to irrelevant websites as pictured below. Both of these are usually found in the footer.

The theme developer deserves credit for creating your beautiful theme, so I would suggest leaving alone the link to their personal website. But if you want to be an asshole like me and avoid leaking link juice out of your blog, you can delete the link or move it to your About page.

On the other hand, the sponsored links mentioned above should be removed from your theme. These links are completely irrelevant to your blog and the spots were probably sold to other webmasters for their link building campaigns.