In my previous post on ForumTemplates.com hitting the 100,000 download mark, I also mentioned how it wasn’t getting any search engine love, even with all the links.

Stefan Juhl and I had a little chit-chat going on in the comments, where Google does recognize 3000 pages, but thinks only 42 are unique enough to mention.

The problem that arises are two fold:

1. Stefan suggests I put in more text, as that might be confusing the search engines. But adding more text would serve no purpose – this is a design that people are downloading/buying – text serves no real function here. Google keeps telling me to design for my users, not search engines. And I have, but it seems like it isn’t working. At all.

2. We have a lot of links as our freebie templates (over 100) require a link back. These aren’t paid. But we could be getting penalized because they are ‘site-wide’ (in the context of the forum software). This is a the slippery slope I was talking about in an earlier post. People saw the design, liked it, downloaded it, and installed it. That is as good of a vote (via link) as you will get. But it seems like we are getting penalized. Fantastic.

So we will see. The site *is* successful (zero PPC, weak organic). But I also believe the site is more than good enough to rank highly in the organic results. Yahoo! shows over 800,000 backlinks. People like this stuff.