The new rage among webmasters is to design and market free wordpress themes. Most Wordpress themes, released under the Creative Commons License, have one to three links that must be kept intact by webmasters before they can use the theme. This way, the theme developer gets backlinks to his own site.

Over the last couple of months, this mode of backlink building has gained tremendous momentum. For example, if you check the ‘Link Sales‘ section of the popular webmaster forum, Digital Point, you will usually find at least 5-6 theme sponsorship offers on the first page itself. The prices for each of these links range from $40 to $200 depending on the quality of the theme.

A number of purist cry themselves hoarse about this SEO strategy but they must realise that this is no different from the thousands of free templates distributed with links on them. Did the webmasters who advertised their links via these free templates suffer? We don’t think so. How search engines perceive these links is open to question. The concept of relevant link is not satisfied since webmasters cannot be told to run websites on specific niches.

If you are a Wordpress theme designer, then go right ahead and make hay while the sun shines. The prices are bound to stabilise once the euphoria dies down. The quality themes will still get the premium sponsors but the low quality cloned themes will be shown the door.