Free theme affect SEO?

In most cases, it is highly unlikely that your theme would affect your search engine ranking. Certainly, the mere fact that it is free has no effect.

However, I can think of several reasons why a theme could potentially affect your ranking.

First, it could be so bloated that it affects the load time of your website. Google is indicated in the past that excessively slow load times may be affect a site's rank in the results.

Second, many free templates have paid links in the footers and they're usually not tagged with rel=nofollow. there's a money free templates out there that I don't think that Google would penalize the site for a couple of paid links in a footer, but no one can be certain of that. If there are a lot of such links (I rarely see more than three) or if the links are to sites that Google considers particularly abusive of its guidelines, those would increase the risk of a penalty.

Yes it would since Google is cracking down on obvious and tired link building tricks. PR and article sites are on the radar and so are theme-based links. Focus on EARNING links instead of BUILDING Them.

The theme has nothing to do with search rankings.
Now with that said there are alot of themes that are
much more seo friendly and will help you with search rankings.

If a theme is made to promote affilaite products, adsense ect it could hurt
but a regular theme that you put content on will not hurt you.

It is hard to help you for not being on google without knowing the website address
and the keywords you are targeting but i promise it is not your theme.

If it's the website in your link, it takes so long to load and it may not be the theme. How many and what plugins do you have. Also it looks like a generic Internet Marketing site in which case your competing with 30 million others. If you do internet marketing you better have one hell of a micro sub niche to rank it for.

The name of the domain has no seo effect whatsoever. That is not a complete downer though.

I wrote on my blog about this not to long ago.
A domain keyword rich is ripe for the pickings but you don't have to have a domain keyword correct. Make another folder in your file manger and name it for the keywords
You want to rank for. So lets say you own xyz.com then install another wordpress site in a sub folder and now the domain is xyz.com/carparts.com

Examples;
http://www.retailmenot.com/view/carparts.com
Amazon.com: Carparts: The Long Winters: MP3... http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/carparts

All of these are on the first page of google for inurl:
I wouldn't try to rank that keyword phrase but just showing an example.

Most will tell you that is not the domain, I completely dissagree. Use the Google operator to check. inurl:carparts you will see plenty of results on subfolders for carparts.

I hope that helped some.

Affilaite links are going to hurt you with the serps now. It is just going to be a matter of fact. You know when I built amazon stores I never put more than four items on a page. I always added a very keyword rich 250 to 300 character description of the product and I never put there link on that page, they would hit buy now and be taken to another page to click to go to amazon.

I never tried to no follow just links. I didn't know it was possible I just always went around it. See I learn something new everyday.

Themes, SEO plugins, they have nothing to do with seo or rankings, besides content affects most now.

The PRICE of the theme has nothing to do with the rankings, but the theme itself may. How content is organized and code-to-content ratio, load times, etc. does play a role. A search engine doesn't care what you paid for the theme.

I don't think that a theme can affect your SEO. However, premium themes are optimized for SEO and provide many features to optimize your site. So if you have a free theme you need to do that manually but yes, you can :-)

If you are using Flexibility 3 free version, you'd have 3 footer links that outbound to the external sites which mostly are not relevance with your niche.

The more amazon affiliate links on your sites the more down rate of the quality of the sites because it looks like MFA site.

There will be no affection with serp about free and paid except the themes which are fully crap coding that could lead to potential risks such as easy to hack, not valid w3 markup, outdated code, unneccessary code, hidden links or malicious code, slow loading time ... that could affect the serp.

There're some good SEO plugins for Wordpress out there, so there's no worry about it except to know how to use it properly. Free or premium themes are no exception for serp if they are having standard markup structures that's enough.

And if you must use free themes, I suggest to use only the themes from official WordPress repository because it's more than safe to use the themes from there, especially, they are valid and real community approval of the submission.

Theme isn't a big issue .. most important is what you are planning to put on that theme.

I don't think a theme could be a reason for a ranking drop! The reason could be a SPAMMY backlink, your competitors are working quite better than you, etc. To get a better ranking, you should work on building backlinks!

A themes can affect your seo as it often involves what h1 and h2 etc will be , so if your themes is optimized h1, h2 etc tags will r properly assigned to titles and such. But whether it is paid or free has nothing to do with this.

No, it wont affect your SEO.

Yes, it's possible a free theme/plugin can kill your page/s in the SERPs.

Example: Why is Google giving me a notice "this site may be compromised"?!

I would guess by just looking at what you posted it looks like a spam laden site. but you could have malicious code in it. Ask your webhost to scan it for you unless you have the capabilities to do it.

Although I knew I had a compromised site and hostgator kept saying they scanned it and couldn't fine it. Well I found the part but couldnt find where it was so I emailed hostgator with the code they found it and killed it.