Why do people create and distribute WordPress themes? Well, apart from just being nice, they almost always have a link back to their website at the bottom of the design. A good design can create hundreds and even thousands of backlinks. It would usually be a fairly gradual link building process, and hopefully one that continues along time.
The official WordPress site has a fairly large and very popular free themes directory. It has just over one thousand themes to choose from and reports over 900,000 downloads so far. Just under a thousand downloads per theme – pretty impressive!
The most popular themes get downloaded more often than others, of course. So, I decided to check and see what happened to the most popular themes on the wordpress theme directory – how many backlinks do the sites they link to actually have?
I checked the five top most popular themes and here are the results:
| Theme | Downloads | Footer Link | Backlinks (Y) | Backlinks (G) | PageRank |
| Pixel | 142,944 | pixel | 887,847 | 4,100 | PR5 |
| Pixel | “ | famfamfam | 1,606,204 | 30,000 | PR5 |
| mystique | 31,511 | digitalnature | 2 | 1100 | PR0 |
| Arclite | 124,230 | digitalnature | “ | “ | PR0 |
| Atahualpa | 308,253 | Atahualpa Theme | 3,202,086 | 212,000 | PR8 |
| Atahualpa | “ | BytesForAll | 2,869,016 | 172,000 | PR8 |
| Arras Theme | 90,783 | About Arras Theme | 312,890 | 3,270 | PR6 |
Obviously, this is not a controlled experiment. The main problems:
- Many of the linked sites have backlinks from other sources as well.
- Some of these sites are promoted via several templates.
Even taking that into account, I think the numbers speak for themselves. Backlink building through distributing free quality blog templates seems to hold some promise. I am going to give it a try myself soon, and I will be promoting a new website on a fresh domain name. The WordPress template will be the only method in which that site will be promoted and I will report the results periodically in this blog – so stay tuned!
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Backlinks from WordPress Themes – crunching some numbers at B6S.net http://ow.ly/AXak
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
But the question that springs to mind is how do you get people to find out about / use your templates. If you’re desperate to build back links it’s likely that you don’t get that much traffic so how will people see your template to start with.
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What you can do is submit your template to the WordPress Theme directory. Then when people search for themes there, your theme can come up in the searches and get downloaded.
You could also set up a web page for your theme and try to SEO that page. I think that might work if you’re going for a niche theme and people may be looking for “blue widgets wordpress theme”.
Hey, new reader here, I found this page while searching for something on this very topic. I’ve been meaning to try this idea for a while. Adding it to the wordpress.org free them library is a good start, but I just had a look on the google adwords keyword tool, and it seems like there is a small trickle of traffic on google for people looking for wordpress themes in one of the niches i work in. I also saw that there are no on-page optimised sites in the SERPs for those phrases. I am going to try this! I won’t be using i on a brand new site, but I can still let you know how it goes if you’d like.
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