Do you use the same Wordpress themes?

Has anyone experience if you use the same WP theme for all your money sites, you ended up getting penalized by the big bad G.

I know people will to be safe, use different themes to minimize any possible traceable footprint. But it would be nice to know someone actually got penalized for having the same theme. If so, it will help me make the conscious effort to switch theme for every one of my money site.

Thanks.

I always mix it up. I have about 50 attractive themes that are modified to suit my requirements and I pick one at random for each new site I build.

Overuse of templates has always been a big problem with getting snapped and there are many people over the years (including me) going back to the doorway page days who have thought that the reason they got banned was template footprints. The issue is slightly lessened with the vast number of Wordpress sites out there using the same themes, but it's definitely something to be aware of.

Using only one theme would definitely be a bad move, if for no other reason than the fact that that particular theme might suck from the perspective of SEO or CTR.

I don't think it is right, why do you mean by penalization? SERPS? or adsence? what about people using premium thems? there are millions of people using the same think i cant be a problem....

yea... premium themes that you purchased are bought by plenty of other individuals... how could google even keep up with whos were whos....i dont see how using the same theme forever would matter.

It matters because there are a ton of other footprints in your sites that you no doubt don't even realize are there, such as:

* repetitive unique text strings
* backlink patterns and sources
* internal linking patterns and site structures
* anchor text patterns

And then your theme is yet another commonality with which Google can link together all your sites.

Google has around 6% of the world's computing power and an army of PhDs... Search engines have been banning people based on template use for at least 10 years, since Altavista and probably before.

First rule of blackhat SEO is MIX IT UP.

You don't get penalized for using the same theme. I'm using the same theme on my network of autoblogs and I don't have any problems so far. On my other projects I do use various themes just for testing stuff.

Autumn said:

It matters because there are a ton of other footprints in your sites that you no doubt don't even realize are there, such as:

* repetitive unique text strings
* backlink patterns and sources
* internal linking patterns and site structures
* anchor text patterns

And then your theme is yet another commonality with which Google can link together all your sites.

Google has around 6% of the world's computing power and an army of PhDs... Search engines have been banning people based on template use for at least 10 years, since Altavista and probably before.

First rule of blackhat SEO is MIX IT UP.

Click to expand...

i feel like if you are attempting to rank and build a brand that you have to use the same theme so when people find different pages they can associate them to the brand you are building...
Is there not a way where you can change the name of the theme for each WP install you do... I was under the impression that this was possible if necessary.

PS Autumn your avatar will forever distract me...

It's not just the name of the theme in wp-content/themes, it's the presentation of the same DOM elements along with the same style elements on every site.

If you're brand building and doing things legit, you don't have to worry. If you're massively link spamming, using scraped / generated content etc, then there is _extremely_ strong evidence that template use is a factor in mass bannings.

You always get a few people saying "but my sites are fine"... But individual anecdotes != evidence, especially when people are generally talking about relatively small numbers of sites. Also there are journal papers going back to the early 2000s that discuss using similarities in markup to identify sites belonging to the same owner.

@ autumn, you may be right.
but i have 3 sites with very basic wp default theme(built in theme).., all 3 on first page and 1 on #spot1 ,