Are You Leaking Through Your Footers?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Have you got wet feet? If you’re using a shared web or blog template, and that includes most of the inexpensive templates as well, then the chances are you are leaking link juice straight out throught the bottom of your site – throught the footers that is.

Free or cheap templates are not really free or cheap. Sure, they don’t cost you in dollar terms and if they do, they don’t cost a lot. However, look at some of the download statistics and do some maths. I have seen one template with 100,000 downloads. If just 10% of those who downloaded use that template, that is 10,000 sites. With at least one, often two, links back to their own sites sitting in the footer – that is 10,000 links back to their pages. Image what that could do their rankings.

There is a solution – actually several. You could simply delete the links, however that is not really fair to template writer. They have put a lot of work into designing that template and deserve the credits. The second option is to use the ‘nofollow’ tag in each of the links.

The third option is to pay for the right to remove those links. Most template creators will accept a small payment to allow you to remove those links. The final option is the most expensive. That option suggests you ditch your current themes and to have one custom build for  you.

If you are not very savvy with removeing or altering links, get an expert to do it for you as part of their search engine optimization fine tuning. Oh – there is another option. You can do nothing and let the link juice flow out from around your feet.