Update: A lot of people misunderstood what I meant by Link spamming. First of all Modifying and releasing the themes with your link in the credit is not at all wrong. But when you do underhand stuff like adding NOFollow Tags to the original authors and on top of that making minimal changes and try to hid your link in the credit it is VERY VERY Wrong.
Update: Since a Lot of people don’t know or can’t seem to understand I added an explanation of the NOFOLLOW tag from the Official Google Blog.
Update:Melvin Ng the owner of
http://wpthemegallery.com/ has resolved the issue with Sadish here and has removed his links from Sadish Themes.
Update: Thilak said he released those themes a long time ago.
Update: This Topics of this post was not in order of Priority. If you feel that not giving Credit to the Orginal theme owner and Adding NOFOLLOW Tags is ok they my friend you have a major crisis with your moral values that is all I can say. But you are right its not illegal.
Explanation of the NoFollow Tag read more from the Official Google Blog
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
We’ve also discussed this issue with colleagues at our fellow search engines and would like to thank MSN Search and Yahoo! for supporting this initiative. Here are a few guidelines for anyone else who wants to join the cause.
I might be kicking up a lot of dirt and upsetting a few people here. Originally I was going to write about Link Spamming after I caught a few well know blogs actively doing it, but after reading the post on wpthemes: Please Respect our Copyright, CopyBlogger: Is it ok to steal Someones Design and the recent fiasco where Google got royally screwed from blogger all over the blogsphere for copying the IE7’s Promotion Page design from Yahoo. I decided to generalize it. to include Plagiarism, Splogs and Paid Reviews. Some of these terms might not sound familiar to the average Joe or reader but if your are a regular blogger you need to know these things.
- Link Spamming
- Plagiarism And Splogs
- Paid Reviews
To understand some of these terms you need to know what SEO is, most average Internet surfers know what this is and I can already see some people yawning so don’t worry I am not going to go into it much. If your a noob when it comes to SEO then head towards the end of this post to read a brief introduction to SEO. We’ll tackle more serious issues here. So what do Link Spamming, Plagiarism, Splogs and Paid Reviews have in common? Its WordPress. Its a well know fact that most of the top bloggers TechCrunch, Scoble use WordPress heck even Matt Cutts Google’s Engineer and SEO Expert uses WordPress even though Google has its own Blogging platform Blogger. Apart from the excellent blogging features which other free blogging platforms lack it is an excellent tool when it comes to SEO and also because of the large number of excellent themes which are SEO Oriented.
Link Spamming
If your on wordpress you know what Askimet is and chances are that you get a lot of spam Comments which Askiment catches for you. The purpose of these spam comments are to leave a link on your blog to their site that they rank well in search Engines for that particular keywords(A typical Black Hat SEO Technique). A while back I found that some people had found a legitimate way to link spam using WordPress Themes/Templates.
Case 1: http://tech-buzz.net/ I noticed it when I chanced upon a blog run by Thilak called Tech-Buzz while searching on Technorati, he seemed to have a high Technorati Rank since a large number of people seemed to be linking to him his blog. What he did was, modify Themes/Templates to a certain degree and release those Themes/Templates on his website while adding his link to the footer of the theme with those of the original theme owners and designers. At first it was hard for me to notice his link since he seemed to have hidden it somewhere inside the source code Check out Coalitionagainsthate.org , http://www.scottgrizzard.com or http://www.nhlanalysis.com they are all running one of Thilak theme which is originally a K2 theme modified into a 3 column by John T P (who is Currently seems busy trying to get into the Top Techorati ranking with a Technorati Fav exchage SIGH People) which was further modified by Thilak. But the funny thing is you won’t notice the link added by thilak in the footer of the theme it is cleverly hidden (Hover your Mouse over the T in word TripleK2 to see his link) you need to go to the HTML source to see the link to his blog but it gets worse he added a NOFOLLOW Html Tag (Special HTML Code to tell search engines not to take the link into account) to the original authors links.
Case 2: http://www.kaushalsheth.com/ This guy’s themes get regularly featured on http://planet.wordpress.org/ The official aggregation of blogs talking about WordPress from around the world. While I appreciate what he does by porting other people’s CSS/XHTML themes to wordpress he also makes it a point to leave a sponsored link in all his themes.
Case 3. http://wpthemegallery.com/ Collects themes from different locations and adds a link to his site and distributes them.
Its more of a matter of ethics here since most of the Themes for wordpress are released under GPL or Creative Commons Share Alike Licence then these people do have a right to modify and add their links i.e. without removing the original copyright links. Though Case 1: is very questionable.
Plagiarism and Splogs.
I don’t have to define Plagiarism, Splogs are Blogs which are automated using programs that steal other people content word for words this mostly done using software called scrapers. These Scarper site are leechs that feed off other people content and have Google Ads(Adsense). Initially when I had switched to partial feeds on Scribez a while back few of our authors and readers voiced their displeasure since Full Feeds are one of the most common ways by which these scraper sites work (Scribez currently has Full feeds you might want to read http://www.fullfeeds.com and debate on Full Feeds Vs Partial Feeds ). Lorelle hates full feed. The Cartoon below illustrators this very well. 
Case 1. http://33rockers.com/ The Previous Owner of 33rockers.com (its been sold to Warren Cardinal) Karthik Kastury was caught plagiarising by Maxpower Ironically Thilak seems to be very upset that Karthik Kastury was stealing his content.
Case 2. People are so lazy in the blogsphere that they blog about what other people blogging and leave a link back to the original source because they are too lazy to write their own content. While technically not plagiarising or Splogging a lot of blogger especially tech blogger make it seem that this is OK. Which is also why Thilaks blog got banned from DIGG.
Example of a Splog: http://digitalnewsflash.com this site feeds of other people RSS Feeds.
How to deal with sploggers and plagiarists
What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content Dealing With Website Plagiarism: When Someone Copies Your Blog Content ?
Paid Blogging
This is a grey area a lot of blogger out there in the blogsphere seem to be divided over this issue. I am talking about services like payperpost.com and reviewme.com which pay the blogger to write a review for a particular product. payperpost.com is more controversial since you have the option on not disclosing to your readers that your being paid to write a review. This could lead to a more sophisticated form of spam example a company which is just starting out could pay blogger to blog about them this not only help to achieve their Viral marketing strategy but also helps boost their presence on Search engines to outdo their rivals. Jason Calacanis has a good post about it here and Labnol both have confirmed this in Matt Cutts own words “Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.”
Why Bother with SEO in the first place
SEO is a vast subject I am just going to touch upon it here. I suggest you read up Aaron Wall’s blog if your interested to know more about it especially his article on Search engine relevancy he is one of the best SEO gurus out there. For the average blogger this is not a big issue but if your a pro blogger or are trying to reach a wider audience you need to know about SEO since 80% of the traffic on the Internet is generated from search engines and if the search engines cannot find you then your losing a major chunk of your audience. SEO are factors which if implemented correctly help to boost your reach and visibility on search engines. Factors for SEO can be divided in two categories
- Internal SEO
- External SEO
Internal Factors
Without getting too technical these are factors which the the blogger has to take care of such as the Content on your blog the keywords/Keyword density that you use, the way you code your Website/Web pages. With wordpress and some of the excellent themes developed by the community members this factor is not such a big issue. Which is why blogs on WordPress.com and wordpress blogs in general have a better chance on search engines than blogs created on blogger, live journal etc (I’ll do a post on this later on why wordpress is much better if your into SEO than other blogging platforms)
External Factors
These factors are how many website are linking to your website/blog etc that why you see people building up there Blog rolls.
I would differ on the point..
Actually, you can do well on any blog platform… all you need is, get the things in right place. i.e. search engine friendly urls, code, pinging, trackback options, technorati integration and integration with few more blogging search networks.
Google or any search engines, does not give any prefrence to wordpress based blogs.
Regards,
Deep
By: Deep on December 12, 2006
at 10:50 pm
Well, the thing with WordPress that the author wanted to point out was that everything is already in place, well make that, at least most of it is already in place =)!
By: Guru Panguji on December 13, 2006
at 1:34 am
@guru you hit the point
I will hold you to your own words. See thats the problem with wordpress all this comes inbuilt and there is hardly any tweaking to do and most of them have plugins.
By: scribez on December 13, 2006
at 6:44 am
Yup… that’s right too
By: Deep on December 13, 2006
at 9:12 am
Is there any way to make sure that the scrapers don’t make money with what we do! I mean, we should get a Creative Commons License or something. It is really wrong that we have decided not to make money out of the information we present to the world. And well these “plagiarist businessmen/women” are so downright unscrupulous that they take the content we write!
By: Guru Panguji on December 13, 2006
at 1:01 pm
@guru
. By the way our blog does have a CC license.
it all depends on your programming skill/scripts some scrapers don’t even need RSS feeds thats the problem with html pages anyone can grab the source. http://www.maxpower.ca/ has a interesting Plugin using which if you detects a scraper’s IP address it will starts feeding “Dirty Content” so instead of the original content some crap gets posted on the scrapers site
By: scribez on December 13, 2006
at 1:48 pm
Hi there.. I am the previous owner of 33rockers.. Thanks for the exposure on thilak..
I never thought about this at all.. It seems that Thilak has made a scapegoat of me to become even more famous.. Now When I have sold my site over to concentrate on my studies people seem to mistake me..
I am getting back to thilak right now to see what he is upto.. All that I know is that he is up for technorati Top 100 rank.. He is a good guy basically but putting all those no follow links he shows his true colour..
Thanks for the exposure scribez..
By: Karthik on December 16, 2006
at 8:16 pm
@Karthik
huh I am not trying to expose anyone here my I am just pointing out that a lot of people seem to doing cheap tricks to boost there SERP(Search Engine Results). Look at the bigger picture we have a major problem in the blogsphere problem since writing this article I came across more than 5 splogs. By the way your still linking to your old domain??
and I wouldn’t go after this Thilak guy. What he did is perfectly legal (but still a cheap trick).
By: scribez on December 16, 2006
at 8:50 pm
Scribez: I just reciprocated what the owner of theme did to me, I have updated the theme long long ago. I would request you to either delete my name or just simple strike it off
By: Thilak on December 16, 2006
at 9:14 pm
Hey thats all false!
Thilak is reloading the themes, not overwrting the ownership!
Plz stop including and blogginga bout things without any proper knowledge!
By: Rishi on December 16, 2006
at 9:26 pm
Well, Talk something against digg and you’ll also get banned from digg. Even Paul Stamatiou is banned from Digg…
By: Thilak on December 16, 2006
at 9:33 pm
i Was talking to thilak and i came to know the true story..
Sorry guys..
Let peace prevail
By: Karthik on December 16, 2006
at 9:37 pm
Thers is no point in fighting it.If you have a theme and you modify it.Make changes according to your requirement.Its a new theme.
Nobody starts from scratch.Everybody starts from a template.And with no follow he did nothing wrong.
And guys there is no point in fighting it.We bloggers should keep a neutral tone.If you are good you will get into ranks one way or the other!!!!
Chill out!!
By: Ashish Mohta on December 16, 2006
at 9:44 pm
Actually, I respect this post. Infact this post made me subscribe to your blog.
By: Thilak on December 16, 2006
at 9:51 pm
Hey there thanks for letting the unexposed information about the blog o sphere hidden tricks but basically i think its bad to expose the information about a particular blog or a blogger without proper knowledge.
Blogs with Good content usually get good traffic but letting names about bloggers would seriously hurt their reputation while you say that what they do is perfectly legal.
regarding the point
“People are so lazy in the blogsphere that they blog about what other people blogging and leave a link back to the original source because they are too lazy to write their own content. ”
Some blogs must act like news middle man agency and there is nothing wrong in it, because the particular news is delivered more fastly and widely… “Information is to Share”.. say for an example if Google releases a product and tech crunch posts about it only techcrunch readers would know the news, what about other readers ?
So there is no thing like Bloggers must post unique things and there is nothing wrong being a news middle man.
By: Sankar Anand on December 16, 2006
at 9:57 pm
Okay, let’s clarify a few inaccuracies here.
First, I do not hate full feeds. I offer information to help people choose which type they would like to use. I have not expressed an opinion that tells people there is only one choice. I’ve chosen both methods for different blogs I have, depending upon the content and the audience. As for those receiving my blog through a feeder which controls which versions they get, it’s up to them to view my feeds in whatever format they prefer, too.
Second, the link scrapping you are talking about is done EVERYWHERE by anyone with a little common sense and the ability. WordPress Themes, for the most part, are released under the guise that they can be modified. If the person feels they have done enough to change the Theme, on the surface or under it, or help the process in any way, then they may do whatever they want. And many users remove all such links, wherever they are in the template files.
Third, links in the footer are not always links for “credit”. In your example of TechBuzz, the link at the bottom is simply a link to the site and a date which implies copyright, but doesn’t not define what the copyright is for. My guess is that it represents a copyright of the content, as that is the most important element and the right thing to do. Every blogger should do this. It’s your content. Protect it.
So your example using TechBuzz doesn’t hold water as stealing or link scraping. This is a normal part of copyrighting your content. It would be better if they included the C or copyright in the link, but it doesn’t matter. It still works. And it does not imply anything about the Theme. Nothing.
I use similar techniques in EVERY WordPress Theme in which I have access to the template files. On my full version blogs, I put the link in the post meta data section as well as in the footer. On my WordPress.com blog, I put it in my post signature. This puts a form of trackback and/or incoming link on my blog which appears in my stats. Thus it helps me rack my posts to true sploggers to see if they are illegally using my articles. Does the link mean “anything”? It means I have an opportunity to protect my work from the truly nasty bastards out there using my hard work to sell their crap. Does it impact my page rank? Nope. Been doing it for years and there has been no changes in page rank. Have I caught sploggers this way? Damn straight I have.
Fourth, the nofollow in the links are put in by some Theme designers, not necessarily the Theme user. It’s a personal decision and both parties have the right to choose. As for WordPress link spamming, this is, as has been said, an issue that has been dealt with Google and Google mostly ignores WordPress.org links for page rank. Don’t forget that their web crawlers typically don’t crawl past the first 1/3 to 1/2 of a page so the footer is often barely reached.
Lastly, if you want to blame anyone, blame me. When WordPress Themes were first released, contests popped up everywhere. I wrote extensively about how to develop Themes for these contests and we promoted use of the two Themes that came with WordPress as the templates to base your new Theme upon. There were many good reasons for this, as these were fairly well tested and the contest folks were having a horrible time with PHP coding, template tags, and bugs as people weren’t understanding how this all worked. Promotion of the “copy from the original Themes” unwittingly released multiple generations of WordPress Themes by anyone and everyone based upon those two Themes, no matter what it looked like on the surface.
So there are thousands of WordPress Themes out there that are literally copies of those two Themes with only a few CSS tweaks to make them look different.
In this day and age of protecting design rights, at which point do you separate the design from the code? Who gets the credit for which? That’s why we’ve also promoted the concept of open source and the rights of WordPress Theme users to hack and whack without fear of reprisal from WordPress Theme authors. If they release it to the public under the “free to hack and whack” license, you can do whatever you want.
WordPress.com blogs, such as you are using, now allow a paid upgrade to access the CSS of the blog and modify it. My site is one such. So in theory, I own the entire “look” copyright of the site but I have no access to the template files in which I could put a copyright notice. The CSS editor also strips out any comments when the stylesheet is uploaded, so any copyright notice I put in there is erased. While I state my “ownership” of the theme design in my blog, it pains me that the credit line goes to someone else at the bottom of every page. Yet, their code makes my design possible. It’s a partnership without equal credit. But has anyone screamed to the world that Lorelle’s isn’t getting her due as a brilliant web designer? Few people and search engines pay attention to footers, which are shrinking all the time. That’s how little weight there really is to the issue you are talking about.
So don’t start a ruckus over something that isn’t really an issue. Let’s put our energy back on the real content thieves who are ripping off our content, not just the folks with links in their footers.
By: Lorelle VanFossen on December 16, 2006
at 10:15 pm
hey scribez
my comments are marked as spam, please check your spam filter…..
By: Sankar Anand on December 16, 2006
at 10:24 pm
First off @ all – any form of content usage without due credit given to the creator of the content is officially plagiarism. I think Lorelle has captured most of the legalities here…
@ Lorelle:
I hope that wasn’t intended at the author! I, for one have been thankful for the post for at least opening my eyes on to something like this and more importantly to the pervasiveness of the same.
Moreover, I really don’t think scribez has made any sort of ruckus over the same! Much like his previous posts, I thought the tone was pretty much neutral, save for the strong disapproval of something like this. The only ruckus that was caused was in the comments, which were very beautifully resolved by the people involved themselves. So, I am @ loss as to why you said that.
Yes, we should definitely concentrate on the content-thieves!!
!
@ scribez: As usual, attracting quite a few bit of people again are we
!
By: Guru Panguji on December 16, 2006
at 10:36 pm
First let me explain a few things here since I can very well see from the comments that most people don’t seem to have a clue to what exactly I meant by link spamming. In fact I am really really surprised with the comment that Lorelle (and I am really disappointed) has posted for someone who been using wordpress for such a long time either she did a quick scan or didn’t read or understand what I posted posted or she doesn’t have a clue about SEO and Frankly I am annoyed that I have to sit and explain this crap.
You are right if a wordpress theme is released under GPL or CC share alike there the modifier can do what ever he wants. But you make it seem like this is ok and that there is no need to credit the original theme creator. Obviously you didn’t read what I wrote carefully I pointed out a few site that were using thilaks theme.
Firstly No theme author in his Sane mind will put a NOFOLLOW TAG to his own copyright link especially for free themes.
The original k2 theme doesn’t have a NOFOLLOW TAG.
The original Modified JohnTP theme doesn’t have a NOFOLLOW TAG.
In the end even if Thilak wanted to modify and distribute it Why hide his name inside a T and add NOFOLLOW tags to the Original Authors.
I really do beg your pardon either I am dumb or I can’t seem understand what your trying to say here. We are talking about someone modifying existing themes and distibuiting it so where does this issue of CONTENT Come up.
Er are you sure you know what your talking about here. Ok maybe the Search Engines don’t care much but Technorati does please check his rank on Techorati and go to page 70-80 to see what I mean. http://technorati.com/search/tech-buzz.net?language=en&start=770
You will see a bunch of T highlighted which are his links.
I think you just lost your head over here or your having a bad day. Why don’t you show me some themes which are licensed under the license that you are saying. I have seen Themes released under The GPL and CC share alike under which you have to credit the author whether you like it or not. Why don’t you try explain this to the guy over here. http://wpthemes.info/posts/2006/12/08/please-respect-our-copyrights/
This is a problem with wordpress.com not in general. You can always have a Copyright Badge in the sidebar. Copyright doesn’t have to be always in the footer of a page.
In the end you make it sound like ripping off other peoples themes without giving them credit is OK Also since we cannot protect our copyright there is nothing we can do.
reciprocating is fine Adding a NOFOLLOW and hiding your link within the Footer is not. Also if you really want to add your link at least modify the theme so that there is 30-40% difference.
@ThilaK I am going to cross off your but not going to remove it. Since I take you to your word that you did this a long time back.
@Rishi dude chill maybe you should talk to thilak he’ll explain why what he did was wrong.
By: scribez on December 16, 2006
at 10:53 pm
Scribez: How can I advertise his theme ? I have no clue how this thing happened.
By: Thilak on December 16, 2006
at 11:04 pm
@thilak I don’t understand what your saying here
@Ashish Please Google for NOFOLLOW and SEO and learn what it is and why it is used. before saying nothing wrong was done.
By: scribez on December 16, 2006
at 11:13 pm
From what I see you have given link spamming a top priority issue over splogs and plagiarism (or is it just the order of the post) ??
I do not see any reason why putting a credit line in the footer of a theme is incorrect or unethical. Infact any theme designer both before wordpress even existed put his/her credit line at the bottom and requested you not to remove it.
If you are not even going to bother paying him for his/herdesign it is decent to credit him for it. If it wasn’t for his/her your site might actually look crap (if you are not a designer yourself).
Have you ever considered the fact that designers put in their time and energy to give something to the community?
I’m not sure if you are aware of how Technorati’s top 100 blogs works. Technorati automatically takes out sites from their top 100 if it is because of credit lines. However you do retain the technorati rank.
I agree with what Lorelle has said about having to concentrate our efforts on the main culprits, the plagiarists and the scraper sites, not on designers with back links or people writing paid reviews.
And in reply to Guruji’s comment
You can do few things.
1. Report the site in question to the advertiser. Google Adsense eg takes this very seriously and the users account just gets banned.
2. Submit a DMCA complaint to the host of the scraper site. They have to pull the plug on it.
I’ve done it in the past and it has succeeded.
3. Get hold of the Antileech plugin that wil help take care of this to some extent.
By: Ajay on December 16, 2006
at 11:37 pm
First of all let me admit that im a noobie when it comes to all the fancy words described above.
Now i personally believe in giving credit where its due. I read a lot of people stating that it wasn’t illegal to modify a theme. I agree. But modifying it in such a way so as to gain an advantage(in ranking) while using techniques to prevent original content(includes themes and literature) owners from reaping benefits of the same is plain unethical and should be condemned.
If i am not mistaken,and feel free to correct me if i am wrong, the whole point here is that the original K2 theme had no such thing as a NOFOLLOW tag while the modfied version in question did. Is this illegal? Absolutely not! But is it ethical! Absolutely NOT!
I believe the author of this post intended to ask the question “Is this practice right?” and meant that in an ethical way rather that legal.
Oh and one more thing, my position on being the middleman for conveying information still stays the same. I do not condone it. I for one, have done that many times. And if im not mistaken some of the most visited sites including digg does that. I think its serves as an effective way of information sharing to those who just visit a couple of sites during a day and use the rest of their time doing other stuff! (Yeah, there are people who spend time away from their computer.Who wouldve known!)
@Ajay: Link Spamming is not been given priority. As far as i can say the post does no such thing. All points specified in the post serve as an eye opener to those who had no clue of such things. Somewhere during the course of comments or elsewhere the focus seems to have been shifted thats all!
Bottom line give credit where its due. If your using someones theme just drop in a word of thanks and credit. Hell most of us aint paying for the theme a word of mention is the least we could do! A secondly we need to flush of the sploggers. Its hard enough to generate good quality content and to see all that hard work being duplicated in a matter of seconds by some crazy piece of code/flesh just brings me to a boil. And like Lorelle said we need to concentrate our efforts in curbing practices like that.
Oh and if you have read the comments thoroughly you would have known by now that any sort of mis-understanding or hard feelings that might have been there has been cleared. So dont bother trying to create confusions regarding that
Lets not turn the blogosphere into one of those cheap places where everyone one with a PC ends up stealing each other’s hard work just for a bunch of extra credits a.k.a ranks!
BLOG WISELY!
By: WildGrey on December 17, 2006
at 12:34 am
That is exactly what I am trying to say.
By: Ajay on December 17, 2006
at 10:27 am
@Wildgrey thanks at least someone managed to read what I wrote and understand what I am trying to say here.
First Of all Guys My Post is about Plagiarism, Link Spamming and Splogs in general.
next my Issues here are
1. About not giving Credit to the orginal auhthor .
2. Adding NoFOLLOW Tags to the Orginal authors links again which is similar to not giving credit to the orginal author.
3. Adding sponsored Links to other people themes and distributing it.
4. Splogs.
5. Plagiarism.
Ajay the topic is generalized and not in Order of priority. If you think ripping of content needs more priority than not giving credit for themes then thats just a difference of opinion. I know a lot of designers who would get really upset if they were not given credit for their work look at Sadish. Finally no one seems to be talking about the NOFOLLOW TAG. I know you are Thilaks friend but when someone make a mistake you need to correct it.
Please please read my Article and comments carefully did I say anywhere that putting credit link is wrong?? I am Talking about modifying other people theme, not giving the original authors credit, Adding NOFollow Tags, Putting Sponsored Links to other people Theme and Distributing it is wrong.
Again please read my article and comments carefully I didn’t say anything about the Technorati’s TOP 100 rank But was taling about the Technorati Rank in general. And yes I know very well How Technorati ranking works and you may be right about Technorati automatically taking out sites from their top 100 if it is because of credit lines. But I’ll will prove it to you on how Thilak’s Rank Increased on Technorati because of the Themes he released. Again I feel your trying to support thilak here rather than understand what I am trying to say.
Ok here goes.
Currently Technorati says TechBuzz has Rank: 3,400 (1,894 links from 598 blogs).
598 is the number of Distinct/Unique blogs pointing towards thilaks blog.
So if you check http://technorati.com/search/tech-buzz.net (I don’t know why I am repeating this since I already Pointed out) on this page you will certain Words Highligted in bold letter which is technorati way of showing you that these were the words used to link to tech-buzz and if you hover your link on these you will see the link to tech-buzz.
So go to http://technorati.com/search/tech-buzz.net Ocassinally you will see Highligted in bold letter the words of the theme example
1. TriK2 theme.
2. Three columns kubrick template.
3. Kubrick Special Edition
Which are the name of themes released by Tech-buzz obviously since Technorati is highlighting Those words it means they do take those links in the credit(footer) into account. First of all Modifying and releasing the themes with your link in the credit is not at all wrong. But when you do underhand stuff like adding NOFollow Tags to the original authors and on top of that making minimal changes and trying to hid your link in the credit is VERY VERY Wrong If you don’t understand what I mean please look at the source code of the credits on http://www.scottgrizzard.com/blog/ and http://www.coalitionagainsthate.org/wordpress/ to undestand what I mean.
By: scribez on December 17, 2006
at 5:41 pm
Hi Scribez,
I just checked this post just today and want to clear few things.First of all I do agree I do keep sponsored links in my themes as many do in the same fraternity like Sadish , theundersigned. It helps me get freedom to pursure the work I like. I do port others XHTML/CSS template but make it a point to keep the link of the original author in the footer of theme.
By: Kaushal on December 18, 2006
at 4:02 pm
@Kaushal
I appreciate what you do Kaushal and porting other people themes and adding your link to the credit is not wrong, I am sure a lot of people benefit from your themes but both Sadish and theundersigned develop their themes from scratch therefore they have the full right to do what ever with their themes. But your are porting other people XHTML/CSS themes to wordpress therefore I feel that adding sponsored links is not the right thing to do. This is just a matter of opinion we can agree to diagree.
By: scribez on December 18, 2006
at 4:17 pm
I understand your point scribez maybe you will see some original themes from me in new year
. Nice design by the way , its different from the last time I saw it.
By: Kaushal on December 18, 2006
at 5:32 pm
[...] There is just too much dirt going around about high profile blogs, 33rockers, tech-buzz, a well read blog publishes this huge post on how the other one’s been cheating/sploging…which assures them 2 things – traffic and publicity. Not that am agaisnt such stuff, it’s really funny how they sqabble about in the comments section. [...]
By: Syn » What happened to that blog? on December 19, 2006
at 7:02 am
Hey Man.. I guess this is an eye opener to all those who think splogs are a shortcut to fame.. (Even to ME).. I believe I was wrong in what I did to 33rockers but I am sorry for it.. I think its time for thilak to accept his mistake and give the credit (remove nofollow) to the original authors too..
By: Karthik on December 19, 2006
at 11:11 am
@karhtik please read the updated post. the nofollow tags were only on the older theme he released not on the current themes.
By: scribez on December 19, 2006
at 11:35 am
thanks for the update scribez.. I was just wondering in which direction is the blogosphere heading for 2007..
By: Karthik on December 19, 2006
at 7:12 pm
[...] So it’s easy as that. And some people even thought I was begging to get favorited, well, Yes, I did ask my readers to add me but that was the only way to make this experiment successful. [...]
By: How To Get Into Technorati’s Top 100 Favorited Blogs - JohnTP.com on December 20, 2006
at 2:01 am
Thanks Guru,
Only recently I found this post.
The issue I had with wpthemegallery.com [Adding his own links to the footer, even though I asked him to remove it] was resolved for my theme, but he is still doing the same to other people’s themes. Of course it is not illegal, but unethical as you rightly said.
This has made me, create a separate License Info page. You know that is what I can do.
Your post makes it clear that you are watching the blogosphere closely, and I appreciate you for that.
Thanks
Sadish
By: Sadish on December 28, 2006
at 1:39 am
[...] of the above points. So why do people seem upset about this whole Sponsored theme have a quick read SEO, Plagiarism, Link Spamming and Splogs With WordPress or else here’s a brief summary if you don’t like long [...]
By: Sponsored Themes beating the dead horse. on April 13, 2007
at 7:20 am