I will never understand what goes on in some people’s minds when they do things. The are like Mr.Hannibal Lector. No one can decipher what goes through his mind to make him want to do all the evil that he does. So do some bloggers and even some online companies that has been purportedly advertised by many to be respectable and trustworthy.
What in the hell was going through the minds of the guys behind WidgetBucks when they hid a link behind their Widgets that so many have been using? Do they really think that this will go unnoticed forever? And when it has been discovered, all they did was to ask their members to download a new, “faster loading” widget because there has been many complains of slow loading widgets in an email I received earlier. Hey, what happened to the “I am so sorry, it won’t happen again” thing, or has that phrase never been taught to them in school? And I was just about to give Widgetbucks another shot when I changed my theme again last night. Looks like that slot will go to Adsense after all.
Themes.. ah themes… I will also never understand what races through the minds of those theme designers who adds a whole string of hidden links in their themes which they offer for free download. Are they being paid for those links. They don’t do anything other than milk the link juice of the people using their theme unknowingly, dry. Those links won’t be creating any publicity or attracting any traffic that’s for sure. It is invisible, for god’s sake and it has been blamed for the recent page rank demotion for some blogs who doesn’t even have a single “bad links” in their blogs. So have you checked if your blogs are clean?
A simple solution will be to load your homepage or our single page, right click and choose view source. Looking at the html codes, if you see any mysterious links that has nothing to do with your page, be very wary about that theme. I was wary about the theme I was using. Even though I have cleaned out all those “dirty” links, I still have a bad feeling about it. When I read that these links might be one of the reasons for bad PR, I change it to be on the safe side.
MattCutts also highlighted about sponsored themes being penalised by Google because of the links an the footer. I don’t know how far this affect has on the recent PR issue, but again on the safe side, I have added the “nofollow” in the links that are present at the footer of this theme. Of course I can just simply remove them altogether, but then, theme designers have an obligation too. So even though the sponsors won’t be getting any link juice, they will still be getting the credits due.
I try as much as possible to use an theme that is not sponsored, but of late, those unsponsored themes have not really been too close to what I was looking for.
It was stupid of Widgetbucks to hide hidden text behind the flash.
As for paid posts, I doubt Google can differentiate between paid and non-paid contents. The only thing they might sniff out is the script enabled tracking image some advertiser required within the post. Other than that, I cannot see how paid posts can contribute to PR drop.
As for the WP theme issue, I am not totally ruling them out, but then not totally convince either. BLogger blogs too get penalized.. and BLogspot is Google’s very own.
Finally, I think this theme looks better than the last. Of course the best looking one is still the first theme you used for BLog Gigs. lol