I recently got a great free template for one of my personal Joomla based websites.
If I would just have used it, and without further need of customization, I would have probably never had seen a small feature of this template.
Give Credit where Credit is Due
I like to give credit to anyone who does things for free for the Internet community, and specially if its for Joomla.
But please don’t use some kind of “hidden” stuff via your CSS style sheet.
Google reads these style sheets looking for stuff just like that!
Its called spamming, but you already know that, why would you otherwise read this Blog..
This template was released with a GPL license, but had one line of code pointing to the developer requesting to keep a copyleft in the code.
Which is perfectly fine by me, so I would have left it there but it was embedded into a div class copyleft.
Checking the style sheet, I saw the class was set to hidden.
Google does not like hidden stuff ! period !. It can get you banned, even if its just, wel just.. in the CSS file..
Bring it out into the open
Did I use the template? yes, because it really looks great, but with one alteration to the Copyleft div and the place of the link and description.
I took out the hidden part and placed the link clearly visible in the footer of the site, and send a email to the developer explaining what and why i did this.
I hope he/she will change this for other people who want to use the template.
I don’t think it was really the intent to spam, but just to get recognition for the work without breaking the template… I hope.
My major point here is, if you want to use free templates for your Joomla website, look to the coding!
It brings in two things that provides you with greater insight:
- You learn to read and ultimately write code for templates
- You learn how to find these hidden stuff.
And If you really want to be on the save Site :-) buy a template from a respected Joomla SEO Template building website.
You can find them , I know you can… just search for “Joomla SEO Templates”, and yes the SEO part IS important, and NO it’s not as expensive as you think!!
Tags
Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign
