| Joomla Template Links Don't Work |
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| Tuesday, 24 April 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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One of the most interesting things about working for clients is that they'll ask questions I don't know the answer to. This happened last week. The question was:
"I have lots of incoming links from templates that we sell. That must help us to rank well..."
However, I didn't know for sure and didn't have any evidence to back up my claims. So, in this post I'll answer the question, "Do Joomla template links work?"
Read on and find out the answer... The HypothesisTemplate designers who distribute their designs with a link back to their own site should be able to accumulate 100s and 1000s of links, enough to rank highly for key searchwords.
The Research
First things first, I needed to study the top ten rankings. I chose to look at one of the most important keyphrases of all: "Joomla Templates".
Websites have a check mark beside them if they distribute templates with links back to them. Rankings for the phrase: Joomla Templates
The Main Conclusion
Most of the major companies who distribute Joomla templates with links are either not listed here or barely rank well. Less than half the sites have incoming links from components on other people sites. Many of those with links and a top-10 rank have far fewer links than other companies who don't rank.
Template links work much better in MSN than in Google or Yahoo. In Google and Yahoo we can conclude that no matter how many links you have, they are probably not going to enable you to rank well. In terms of user popularity it is reasonably easy to determine the relative levels of most template providers. Google doesn't rank several of the most popular.
There's no reason for template designers to remove these links from their products, because they may well provide advertising and lead people back to their site, but designers should be aware that they'll gain little SEO benefit in Google or Yahoo.
Tomorrow, I'll repeat this research with links from components. Other Thoughts
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Comments (7)
  written by Lawrence Meckan, April 23, 2007
I'm going to be running a few similar SEO experiments along this line of thought, Steve.. I won't give away the search terms I'm using, but the focus will be content.. which should rate higher than blatant keyword stuffing inside the title (as per Rockettheme and a few other sites)
written by sean, April 24, 2007
you may be interested in this:
http://www.iwdn.net/showthread.php?t=5914 makes me wonder if all those SEF and SEO extensions at Joomla! actually are worth anything...  written by Brian Teeman, April 24, 2007
Not quite true to put an x next to joomla.org as the default teplates do include a link back
 written by steve, April 24, 2007
Lawrence - great news... I saw a mention of it on your latest blog post. I'll be watching with interest.
Sean - what a really interesting article. Brian posed the question a little while ago about whether document.write was indexed. I hadn't had time to research that, but this answers the question  Brian - you're right. I should change Joomla.org to a tick/check. By rights, joomla.org shouldn't need backlinks, being such a powerful, trusted domain, but I'm sure it probably has 100,000s. written by Brian Teeman, April 25, 2007
I suspect that joomla.org has such a higher PR etc mainly because of those backlinks.
written by steve, April 25, 2007 I suspect that joomla.org has such a higher PR etc mainly because of those backlinks My first instinct is to say that all each editorial link Joomla has gained would be much worth far more than the links from Joomla installs. However, that is just a hunch based on experience and what I've found here. If only I could devise an experiment to prove that.... Write comment
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