Joomla Template Links Don't Work

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..."

 
Of course, lots of companies add a link back to their own site from templates that they sell or give away. For some companies, this can add up to 1000s of incoming links. However, my immediate instinct was to say "no". That gut reaction was based on two factors:

1. If the links did help them rank well, the client wouldn't be talking to me
2. Search Engines generally don't enjoy seeing hundreds of repetitive links with the same anchor text, because they are so easy to spam.
   

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 Hypothesis

Template 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.

	Google [-]	Yahoo [-]	MSN [-]
1	Compassdesigns.net	Joomlashack.com	Joomla.org/...
2	Joomlashack.com	Joomla-templates.com	Joomla.org/...
3	Best-joomla-templates.com	Siteground.com/...	Joomlart.com
4	Joomla-templates.com	Compassdesigns.net	Joomlart.com/...
5	Joomlatemplates.com	Joomlart.com	Joomlashack.com
6	Joomladesigns.co.uk	JoomlaResource.com	Joomla-templates.com
7	Themesbase.com/...	Compassdesigns.net/...	Compassdesigns.net
8	Joomlahacks.com/...	Rockettheme.com	TY2U.com
9	Joomla.org/...	Mambohut.com	JoomlaTemplateStyle.com
10	Joomla24.com	Joomlahacks.com/...	Siteground.com/...
Total	5 with template links	5 with template links	7 with template links

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

• Domain names matter greatly. Google in particular gives heavy weight to sites with both "Joomla" and "template" in their name.
• Only two sites consistently rank well. With the exception of CompassDesigns.net and JoomlaShack.com, most sites only break into the top ten in one search engine.
• Google lists more non-commercial sites. Whereas MSN list 8 sites selling commercial templates, Google has half that number.

Free Weekly Joomla Tutorials

Your Comments (9)

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)

zooma

April 23, 2007

Nice info. thank you !

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...

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

Steve Burge

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 [removed] 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.

Brian Teeman

April 25, 2007

I suspect that joomla.org has such a higher PR etc mainly because of those backlinks.

Steve Burge

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....

Space Zone

July 24, 2008

Joomla.org is an official site and whether or not it gain alot PR depending on
1. unique article content
2. many link places in many directories such as Dmoz
3. many links in forums and sites that people add
4. basic template copyright link
and so on
so it's not fair to place it with those sites I guess

seo ibiza

August 24, 2008

hmm.

hate to disagree and all that but whilst doing some competitor research for a client today we stumbled onto an SEO company who have been hiding links to their own company, and to what looks like another one or two of their own different companies in joomla templates.

and the links are working VERY well on behalf of the company sites they are pointing at, which is why we were researching them in the first place, top 3 in hardcore competitive searches.

of course these are not standard footer links, they're mid page on the homepage (and probably every page) of every site.