Wordpress Footprints

Well, even if you are building a splog, "footprints" won't hurt you. they might even lend you a helping hand for a little while.

Sorry but I would be a little skeptical of someone telling me to pass up a free template b/c of this footprint thing and then to additionally spend money on a different one.

I think this is myth. Focus on giving people great content and a reason to come back to your blog. I think the design and usability of your blog is 1000x more important than this footprint thing.

/2 cents

If Google were punishing WP for footprints half the net would be de-indexed (97% in the IMiverse).

Don't worry about it.

Thats the money phrase right there people.

The only rational thing I can think of that might lead someone to this idea is using a very code-heavy theme with very little content. A spider encountering a site with 1,000 "words" (most of which are identical html and css styling) with only a handful of words changing on each page might see that as duplicate content and penalize that.

In this case, it would have nothing to do with whether the theme is used with WP or not. It would have everything to do with being a poorly constructed theme, or pages without enough content.

If all your blogs are not performing then you can be very sure it's NOT from a free wordpress theme template.

Might just be horrible looking template?

It could be anything without knowing exactly what the blogs are. but if you are consistantly creating underperforming blogs then you are likely repeating the same mistakes.

If by underperforming you mean you do not get many searches from Google then look at your content and keywords, look at your on-site SEO and your backlinks.

Just type in your main keywords into Google and look at the sites that are in the top ten results.

What do they look like? What interesting content do they offer? What backlinks do they have?

If you want to share that page 1 you will have to emulate (or beat) those top ten players.

Forget about footprints - it's holding you back from doing what's needed.

When people talk about certain templates having a 'heavy footprint', they mean that the template contains bits of code, scripts, tags, etc. that identify that template. You can change cosmetics, switch out the graphics, etc., but it is still that template.

By itself, the footprint isn't a big issue. If it were, the thousands of blogs running on the default theme wouldn't have a chance.

The trouble comes when the footprint is associated with undesirable behavior. For example, look at the fake news splogs. You know the ones - they try to look like a newspaper page, and they use a script to make the headline call out the town your ISP is located in to make it look like a local story. The spammers who posted thousands of those splogs used the same theme, so it was quickly associated with those splogs.

Any time that template was identified, the sites were delisted.

The same thing happened to the software-generating MFA scraper sites. They left a footprint that became associated with garbage content, so Google started delisting any site with that footprint as fast as they could identify them.

You prevent it by giving Google what it wants and avoiding questionable methods. In other words, if you don't want the hunters shooting at you, don't run around flapping your wings and quacking like a duck...