One of the first things I was taught in Discrete Math in university was that just because b happens after a does not mean a caused b.

So when I saw Matt trumpeting that by removing sponsored themes, he had saved newbie bloggers – I shook my head.

Countless blogs could have been penalized just for the theme they were using, not related to anything they did or did not do on their blog. It was a tough decision at the time, it probably drew more criticism and personal attacks against me than anything we’ve done before, but time has proved us right.

1. Beyond the smug factor, the FUD being spread is insane. There is absolutely no proof that having a sponsored theme would make you rank lower (and point #4 proves the opposite). Or de-ranked. Or anything of that sort. The usage of ‘could‘ is a nice touch – reminds me of Fox News with their ‘?’ after every preposterous idea. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt – you hit all three letters of FUD here Matt.

2. From anecdotal evidence from sites my friends operate that did get dinged (not a single one of our sites got dinged), the only thing that got ‘hurt’ was PageRank. The actual amount of traffic going to these sites has remained the same. It is obvious that lowering the PageRank was to simply hurt text sales. So – if a blogger downloaded a sponsored them, liked it, used it, and lost no traffic (other than the public value of PR) – what is the problem again? The perceived ‘penalized’ problem that has no basis in reality?

3. Sites like Engadget got hit. That is a heavyweight site that pushes a ton of traffic (we get comscore numbers). Even niche but high-pagerank sites like Daring Fireball got hit. So where do Engadget and DF fit into the schema of ‘paid links’? Obviously they don’t – this update was more than just ‘having a link in the footer’

4. No better data to look at than blogs using our themes we’ve released for free. We have released five wordpress themes for free, with every single one getting a ton of accolades (all of them have been converted to other blogging platforms by end-users). Each of our themes has a link to Design Disease (our webdesign arm) + another site. Our license requires you keep the link to Design Disease, but you may remove the secondary link. About 95% of people keep the secondary link. Looking over stats on blogs using our themes (over 1000), less than 1% had a PageRank drop (of which a few of them I am sure had a PR drop coming regardless of ‘sponsored links’). I guess the ‘less than 1% of blogs affected’ needed Matt’s help there.

I would hope someone like Matt in his position would be a bit more responsible with his comments. I thought he was above FUD.

Update: My favorite two quotes in the comments:

IMO it best if theme designer used microid,rdf or cc-publisher etc .. as signature for their work.

-chaoskaizer

This coming from someone using our Illacrimo theme and not linking back (as required).

And again:

Well, i’m against sponsored themes but not so with paid links. Paid links can be a good side income for web publishers, why penalize that?

-Young Engineer

And this guy is ripping off our Blogging Pro theme.

Two people whining about sponsored themes (in just one blog post), and both of them stealing our themes. I like how moral-superiority can be so hypocritical.

Update 2: My post tomorrow should be on our own results on giving away quality free themes. Mind you – quality is the key word here.