This is kind of stupid: A ThreadWatch thread (one Aaron Wall decided was small potatoes enough to pull from the front page) calls out Google’s Matt Cutts for not crediting the creator of his WordPress theme.
It notes that the theme, by default, has a link to the homepage of the creator, and Matt must have cut it out when customizing.
Well, look at my blogs. I’m relatively sure I give no credit (although they likely came that way, you can check yourself if you care so much). Maybe I should, but as text, not a link. No one creates themes for money, otherwise they’d just sell them (and I’d gladly pay for a good one), they do it to show off their skills and help out. Random link juice only hurts the quality of search results and accomplishes nothing. You should let people know where they can get your theme, and credit whoever worked hard on it, but sending along PageRank is not a requirement.
As a person concerned with SEO and search spam, Matt is exactly the person who should never include such a link! Remember when WordPress was spamming Google, because of the exact same credit links on millions of WordPress blogs? If this is your job, why would you do the exact same thing you try to stop others from doing?
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For the record, my theme is currently “Three Column Black And Red” by Lee Penney, obviously heavily modified by myself, but retaining all of the basic site structure. Lee’s template has code that is a breeze to work with, unlike some other themes I’ve tried. And yes, I was serious about paying for a new theme, but you don’t want the job; my ideas are specific, vague, difficult and annoying.
Oh, and look at this theme. It’s wild!
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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