The basics of the situation is that many of the themes with sponsored links on the WordPress site got nuked. Most theme owners claim there was little notice to get themes updated and into compliance with new policies. Others claim that even themes that complied with new policies got nuked.

Reading some of the justifications from some of those happy about affairs shows quite a bit about myths surrounding the idea of inbound links.

I’ve seen a number of people claim that when you use a sponsored template, with links to the sponsor in the footer, you are ‘giving away your PageRank to this sponsor!’

I really see several issues with that assertion:

1. Most blogs don’t have much in the way of PageRank to ‘give away.’
2. Those that DO tend to create custom designs, or know enough about branding to want to avoid heavily spammy sponsored links.
3. Most of the themes I’ve seen that have 3-4 sponsored links look really bad. Ugly = not likely to be downloaded.
4. Providing a few outbound links on ANY site isn’t going to trash your own ability to rank. It’s all a matter of proportion.

I honestly doubt all that many sponsors of the spammy-class of sponsored themes (ie, themes with 4-5 outlinks on it) see a lot of rank help from the activity. It doesn’t fall into the same class in my mind as the people who comment-spam blogs on Bob Dole drugs, but it’s not altogether dissimilar.

The people who know least about sponsors and themes and etc. most likely use hosted solutions and don’t know how to download themes anyway. Those people also likely have the lowest PageRank, anyway.

Those who know at some level that all the footer links at least look bad, might be spammy, and might be intended as SEO (but kind of fall into Dunce Hat SEO in my book) are the people less likely to have downloaded these themes.

Those who are pretty sure, if nothing else, that the spammy footer links are ugly, and who have high-traffic blogs, are likely also the ones who get some customization done and don’t need sponsored links anyway. And those are the blog owners who could actually help a sponsor.

(And that’s before even calling into question if the links count for much anyway. Footer links are the dead real estate and code zone of a page, and are typically easy enough to discount in an algorithim the way most page code lays out. But I won’t even go there right now.)

I think for both agencies and little guys, this is outstanding news. I’ve said before that I think some bad behaviors by little webmasters tends to occur from good intentions (the road to hell, etc.). Having clear communications when these good intentions really do lead into hell will benefit the perpetrators, and hopefully improve overall content quality within SERPs.

As far as agencies are concerned, I already think Webmaster Central gives the agency a better view of what the client may be doing on their own, especially as far as ill-conceived (well undoubtedly well-intentioned) independent link-building is concerned. Having a formal communications channel when penalties or removals occur helps deal with client confusion, and to deal with the inevitable questions:

• “You’re an SEO. Can’t you just call someone at Google and have them fix it?” (no)
• “How can you tell I’m penalized?” (duh, check your traffic and indexing)

Ought to be fun to see how this develops…

I think even in the biz, black hat is an overused phrase. I’ve always assigned technical prowess and intent to deceive to black-hattery. Keyword stuffing is amateur-hour stuff.

Here’s how I would break it down:
Black Hat:

• IP addressing
• Cloaking
• Squatting (where it requires server exploits)
• Scripting exploits
• Certain types of doorways

Dunce Cap:

• Keyword stuffing
• White-on-white text and links

The thing is, a lot of black hat tactics are either smart, or require some sense to make work. Dunce-cap tactics are the sort of thing anyone’s technophobic great-aunt could execute, and are dumb ideas to boot.

Personally, I prefer to be a tinfoil-hat SEO. The tinfoil protects my brain from rays emitted by Google’s Earth-orbit satellite data centers, and is a charming fashion statement in years where metallics are considered a must-have accessory.