Freebies with a catch.
I have fallen for the same thing when I was just beginning my blogging days. There are a huge number of websites that offer free WP themes. Most of them are simply collections from other sites and are NOT authorized. What they normally do is encrypt the footer of every theme they “offer” with links to their own sites (not even the actual authors site). The code is usually a base64 encryption and simply removing it would ruin the theme as You will actually be removing a part of the website. To remove the code without ruining Your site do the following:
- Activate the theme
- View the front page of Your blog in the browser
- Right click and select ‘View source’
- Scroll down to the bottom and look for the opening footer tag
- Copy everything beginning with that tag down to closing html tag (including it of course) tag.
- Go back to admin panel
- Go to Appearance > Editor and select footer.php
- Delete all the encrypted code from there and paste what You have just copied from source and save the file.
- Now go back to Your site and make sure that everything is okay
If everything looks fine than the code You copied was correct. If You something looks askew than it usually means that there is a closing div tag missing right before the opening footer tag. Simply go back to the editor and insert a closing
div tag right on top of everything else in the footer.
If You receive the error saying something about missing links or copyright bullshit that means that there is a whole lot of code somewhere else and You are better off getting a new theme. But even if everything looks just fine after You have fixed the footer there still can be encrypted code in any of the template files that can completely screw up You SEO and pretty much everything else.
Leland from themelab.com has made a video with some of the examples of the hidden code. You can see the video here.
This topic has been mentioned many times on many different websites, even on wordpress.org. The best way to make sure that You have a safe template is to download Your themes from the actual authors pages or wordpress.org itself.
