The Whole Truth About Hidden Links and Viruses in Templates
By downloading premium templates and extensions from all sorts of popular websites for free, many webmasters do not even think that such downloads may contain well hidden link spam, backdoors, viruses, malware and trojans.
Moreover, all of this causes great harm to your favorite websites. We decided to create this useful page to protect against possible sanctions by the search engines.
Top-5 “dirty” websites from worldwide
| URL | CMS | PageRank | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| http://bigtheme.net/ | Joomla | 6 | The most “dirty” theme-based website of the Internet. Each of the archives has from 4 to 8 hidden and cleverly coded links to external sites. Usually links do not appear immediately, but after 20-100 views of any material. The same “junk” is embedded in the *.js and *.css files. |
| http://www.mafiashare.net/ | WordPress | 6 | It belongs to the same owner as the ‘bigtheme.net’. The same “dirty” archives, but on another website + premium themes for WordPress. |
| http://joomla-master.org/ | Joomla | 9 | Another famous website for the fans of downloading free templates with viruses and hidden links |
| http://joomla4ever.ru/ | Joomla | 2 | Very popular website for Joomla-lovers. All templates, components and modules are “forced” with hidden links and malware. Be careful. |
| http://wp-templates.ru/ | WordPress | 5 | One of the most popular sites for WordPress uses templates as a reference site for its own purposes. |
However, you have to understand and realize that this is only a small drop in the ocean. A huge number of less popular websites provide far more overall damage than the above stated “mastodons” of link trading.
We conducted a detailed study of the situation and we could not find any (!) thematical website that would not insert hidden links or other malicious code in the premium templates and extensions. The appearance of our website themegrizzly.com is the expected response to this chaos.
If you already have downloaded any of the premium materials free from any website, then with 99% probability it can be argued that there are hidden links, viruses, backdoors and another evil.
Two reasons to remove the “dirty” template
Reason 1: Search engines clearly classify all hidden links a website as search spam. Google has clearly defined its position about this in the official blog. Yandex completely shares the opinion of Google. If a website contains such a “surprise”, it leads to:
- Increased chance to get under the Google Penguin filter (content filter from Google search engine) and observe not more than a dozen pages in the search index with a very low overall visits of the resource.
- Increased chance of getting into the search engines BAN and losing all potential users and buyers
- Reduced chance to get on the top rankings in search results
Reason 2: A great opportunity to find and install a new version of the template, with new features or fixes of previous errors and bugs (current versions of templates are very rarely seen in free access, if at all there)
About the independent search of hidden links
Sometimes even the most experienced webmaster has to place a great effort to find links and text hidden from the eyes of the users. Hiding technologies do not stand still and now they have reached a sufficiently high level of development.
We strongly recommend abandoning the idea of self-searching and removing hidden links, if you are certainly not an expert on programming languages. There is a high likelihood that you will not delete all of them and something may appear with time.
Best alternatives
In reality, there are only two places where there is a 100% chance to download the latest version of the original distribution of premium template or add-in: official sites of developers and our clubbing themegrizzly.com.
Other sources may be “allowing” dirty files, because they do not have and will never have such a database of subscriptions.