Months ago I was featuring WPthemesfree.com for their great site and services for theme submit. Today I just caught up with Moses whose theme also been landed there and SHOCKED that they were adding an extra link in the footer in each theme. Moses, myself, and other theme designers and theme developer’s themes had been added an extra backlink to WPthemesfree. When I check on the technorati stats, their backlink mostly comes from the modified theme itself. Is this the price to pay for submitting the theme to their site? again nothing mentions these rules and terms…I don’t really think the theme code itself can auto-generate and input the extra backlink in the theme code so the only explanation will be a manual input of their link in the themes by their staff member EDIT: they already stated below the upload page footer. Here’s what I found when downloading my latest theme there and look at the theme code itself:
<a href=”http://www.dezzain.com”>Dezzain Studio</a> | Brought by <a href=”http://www.wpthemesfree.com/” title=”Free WordPress Themes”>Free WordPress Themes</a>
an extra line was added to the theme code itself. The thing that really freaks me out is that they should mention something about this on their main page but still no FAQ or any mention regarding this rule when you submit the theme there. The hardest beating to this event would be a standalone designer’s theme that was submitted to the site since everyone had the upload right regardless if you’re the original author or not.
A couple of standalone designers such as wpdesigner and milo IIIIVII and many more were landed with an extra backlink to the site. This is just a violation of the designer himself. I personally will not submit my theme there anymore before some explanation can come up with this issue. So I will appreciate if any users downloaded my themes there can redownload it again from my main site for an original copy of the themes and that goes for all the users that download another designer theme there, you can visit the original author site to obtain the original copy of the theme without the extra link to wpthemefree.
Finally, I suggest WPthemesfree.com staff can state a clearer rule about theme submit there so there’s no more confusion in their later development…