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What to Do when Your Footer Is Abused

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Isaac Yassar in Blogging

Hello mate!

Is your footer abused and ‘wet’ because your pagerank juice leaks?

See, a free or shared website theme / template usually has this footer where the designer’s credit link is located. Unfortunately, some nasty designers misuse their credit links. They put not only their links, but also irrelevant links as keyword attempts / abuses. It has a good chance that the abusive links are paid ones. And Google and friends are against it.

A credit link on footer is proper and respectful, but illegal keyword attempts are influential abuses. It can lead to pagerank leaking and penalty / ban by Google because of linking to abusers. Google define you by not only where you are linked from, but also where you are linking to, because webmasters always have control on where they link to. Now you don’t want to get banned by Google, do you?

So, here is what you can do about it:

1. Removing the keyword abuses

You can delete only the irrelevant links, but not the designer’s true link. Thus, the keyword attempts are removed, but the credit for the designer is intact. Usually the designer’s website can be easily recognized among the link abuses. For example, there are four links in the footer: Used Cars, Singapore F1, Bikers Lounge, and Free Wordpress Themes, you know which one is the designer, right?

To remove the unnecessary links, you probably need to visit your Dashboard >> Appearance >> Editor >> footer.php. Link code in PHP is the same as in HTML, if you can find one on HTML, you should be able to find ones on PHP.

Format: <a href=”URL destination”>Text</a>

2. Adding nofollow tags

You can add nofollow tags to the abusive links so they will not be followed by crawler bots and your pagerank will be safe. It will also protect your site from penalty by Google and other search engines, because of linking to abuser websites.

To add the tags, you will also need to visit your Dashboard >> Appearance >> Editor >> footer.php. You can add the tag to the link codes.

Format: <a href=”URL destination” rel=”nofollow”>Text</a>

3. Changing your theme

If you are not techie enough to apply those two solutions above, you can just easily change your theme. There are many free / premium themes out there without the designers conducting keyword / link abuses. You can use them and rest assured.

Official WordPress Theme Directory is always a good place to start looking for a good free theme.

All theme designers deserve credit links, but none of them has the right to commit abuse. Don’t you think?

Tags: abuse, footer