[WARNING] Niche site builders - Why you really need to vary your template/themes.

[profitsforall]

I was looking through my web stats yesterday looking at the keywords that visitors use to find my site, and I saw a keyword prhase combination that obviously would never be used normally by a surfer, i thought it was odd but pretty much forgot about it shortly after.

LAter, I started building another site and after uploading my theme checked that it looked right, and noticed that parts of the odd phrase I'd seen earlier leapt out at me from my page.

The template I'd bought had a pretty massive footprint (in fact it had more than one).

For those that don't know what a footprint is - it's a standard piece of text on a webpage that can be used to identify similar sites.


For example "Powered by wordpress" is a footprint that can be used to find wordpress blogs (but the sheer volume of results doesn't make it very worthwhile). Likewise you can find SMF forums, phpbb forums using footprints (and many other types of site too).

Now imagine if you knew there was a theme used specifically for folks building one type of niche site. Looking at that theme you notice that it has a standard phrase in it, that isn't common to other sites. Most people won't change that boilerplate text. You can now google that phrase and find a load of sites using that theme. This was essentially what someone had done to me.

I plugged the footprints in - and found a large number of sites, including my own, and got a whole load of ideas for niches to research, and found some competitors for niches I was already targetting. That kind of information can be gold.

I spent a little while editing my theme on various websites to change the footprint and to ensure it wasn't the same across my sites, but I'm more annoyed at myself. This is basic stuff I knew about years ago when I was making made for adsense sites. I even had a system in place that reduced the footprints on my sites. I'm also incredibly glad that this happened while I only have 6 sites up and running.

However, each site I make now takes up a lot of time with research, qualtiy content generation, niche identification. Having a footprint is almost the same as me handing a dossier with all that that information straight to my competitors.

What i re-learnt from this - vary your themes, buy them from different sources, to reduce the number of sites that can be found. Change the default boilerplate text on those themes, to reduce the chances your site will be found even further.

This is also one very good reason why you should never reveal even one of your niche sites to someone else - if there is any footprint they may be able to find the rest of your sites..

[Joe.Mc]

I've started working on niche sites recently and I have noticed some strange keyword phrases leading visitors to my sites. Are these "footprints" actually embedded in the php coding or is it just plain text left in the footer?

[Gary King]

Originally Posted by Joe.Mc

I've started working on niche sites recently and I have noticed some strange keyword phrases leading visitors to my sites. Are these "footprints" actually embedded in the php coding or is it just plain text left in the footer?

Could be either Joe...

Most free themes have a link back to the designer in the footer, that's why they are free.

Other more "creative" people have put them in the php so it's harder for less experienced people to edit and there's even a technique to embed a trojan horse kind of thing in the php coding - usually set to activate later and launch CPA ads or similar.

[profitsforall]

In my case it was text placed in a couple of the php files associated with the theme, easily edited though.

If i do use these theme again, I'll edit the files before uploading, so I only have to make the change once, but I've got software that designs and generates themes but will have to edit bits of the code to make sure it does the same thing as my existing theme.

[Linda Hepworth]

Does Wordpress do that ? If so how do you fix it ?