This is something I had not bumped into before, but today I downloaded a free WordPress theme to adapt to my own wishes (which usually involves a whole lot of hacking and slashing), but this one took some extra time because it was riddled with invisible links to several commercial sites, apparently to boost them via the bots that usually visit blogs. The crappy part was that the code that published the links was actually encrypted to prevent removing the links. This particular creator even went so far as to change the default WordPress ‘Meta’ links to his own site.
Translation: if I hadn’t been hacking my way through the code I wouldn’t easily have found the semi-hidden links, so anyone just downloading and using this theme or one like it will inadvertently aid these somewhat immoral practices and end up with a slightly crippled blog.
Update: After finding that all of their themes have these links etc. I’ve decided to name and shame: the free templates came from wpthemescreator.
Update 2: Some more investigation even found some hidden encrypted code in the theme that inserted links to the creator’s site quasi-randomly in the blog’s links and probably the footer as well. Yechh. I’ve decided to still use the cleaned up theme but remove any link to the creators, even though that is normally against my principles.
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