Do backlinks from free WordPress themes work?

Case scenario: You build a wordpress theme and distribute it for free. In its footer you place a link to a site of yours that you want to promote, using the keyword you want. You submit the theme to theme directories. It gets downloaded and some of those who downloaded it remove the link but some don't. The result is you get a bunch of backlinks.

My question is: does this still work or you end up with the site penalized? I know Matt Cuts stated this is not agreed by Google and is considered black hat. From that to Google figuring out that you did that, is a long way but not impossible to figure out.

Anybody tried this? When? Did it worked? Is it still working? Did you got any of the sites penalized?

It works. Maybe if you had the most popular theme ever they would manually penalize it. Look at some of the big template places, they have hugely well ranking and high PR site from WP theme footer links alone.

That being said its a real hassle to make a theme and even harder for it to be huge. Your efforts are probably better spent elsewhere.

Yeah but a themes site is related to the topic of WP themes. I was thinking more along the lines of building a theme and adding in the footer a link with a text like "loose weight" or "ipod cases" or something like that which is not related.

Regarding my efforts, I can probably build about 50 different looking themes in 3-5 days. So I would say it is worth it.

Just like wowhaxor say it will work as long as u have a very good design that everybody wants to download and keep forever for their sites....If only 10-20 people will download it and then change it a few days later you probably will do better with another type of linkbuilding

I think I'll give it a try. Nothing to loose really.

It would work. It's just like submitting software to software directories. If you're sending them back to a targeted website it would work even better but yes, you can use it for baclink building.