The specific theme you use doesn't matter. What matters is that your site is optimized for speed, is easy for search engines to crawl, and is easy for people to navigate. There are some themes that do these things better than others. But, most themes can be adapted to meet these needs.

The theme controls the layout and the code of the site, so yeah, it definitely can make a difference.

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I agree with Mike.

A badly designed theme can be slow to load and format HTML that isn't as friendly to search engines as other themes.

A WordPress theme can have a major impact on a sites SERPs and traffic, I've seen sites over double their traffic after moving to the WordPress SEO theme I develop.

There are themes (and SEO plugins) that are so poorly thought out they can kneecap your on-site SEO.

Obviously a theme isn't the be all and end all of SEO, themes can't write decent content, they don't generate backlinks, they don't stop a user making SEO mistakes, but they can easily damage a sites SEO or improve it.

David

All of the above. Poorly conceived themes can do a lot of damage, particularly if they congest and dilute things like title elements with unnecessary text (leave a comment, related posts, about the author, etc being common points of failure.)

Then of course there's a host of layout concerns like divitis or JS/CSS being blocked by the stock robots.txt file, cluttered head sections (which is particularly important as this is often the base data Google store in their BigTable for a lot of base algo calculations), etc etc etc....

The rule of thumb here is to not sacrifice appearance for poor SEO unless you are confident in your ability with CSS and PHP to restyle an correct the problems by hand.

Okay, so yeah. It is the made up horseshit category.

The same theme is the kind of thing that could get you screwed on a manual review.

They are not hitting sites algorithmically based on a WordPress theme.

There is zero evidence of that.

Experience has shown me that it completely depends on saturation.

Something like a theme thats publicly available and on thousands of domains won't be a problem.

However when creating splogs out of html frameworks that are simply filled by software (which doesn't need to be publicly named here) there is some evidence that identical templates with similar content characteristics can have negative effects. That's why some of those software applications offer what is known as a template spinner, to randomize the html and css of a template and allowing it to be used more effectively across dozens of domains.

^There's no support I can openly post on that. It's just something tested, known and understood in the cloaking industry.

That having been said, wordpress sites don't seem to suffer similar problems as a general rule. I have no technical support for that either.

** This was me trying to dance on a line between giving some insight and not selling out private BH communities. Anything further would only be suited for PM's

Oh, but also, SEO Crate's take on it is insane.

Panda and Penguin have nothing to do with themes. That's just some random horseshit theory.

Theme wouldn't matter. The only thing a certain theme would do is help CTR and maybe bounce rate. Plugins do help SEO though.

Themes control the layout of a page . So, ya it matters in terms of SEO. Always use SEO friendly themes.