Creating useful plugins or great looking themes are great ways to boost your PR. There are big differences in the benefits you get from them though, due to the nature of the links that come with them.
Links from creating themes
Good themes get a lot of site-wide links from the themes footer. That’s a well known fact. They also get a fair number of backlinks to the themes page, from articles written by bloggers.
Just looking at the theme I’m using right now, the official download page has 440 backlinks showing up in Yahoo. Searching for the footer text “Illacrimo Theme is created by: Design Disease brought to you by LifeSpy” gives 82,000 results in Google. That’s 82,000 footer links pointing to the homepage of Design Disease and LifeSpy.
Now, 82,000 backlinks showing up in 1 month, all with the same title, that can’t be that good. I don’t know enough SEO, so I have no idea if the possible penalty will be less harsh because LifeSpy is already a PR5, or if it applies only to new blogs gaining links fast.
Typical links gained with themes are those from new blogs or blogs of less authority, that decide to change their theme. High authority blogs don’t usually announce new themes being launched, and don’t change their own theme to free versions. They usually go the custom theme route.
All that said, I still believe themes are good ways to gain backlinks, just don’t believe they are the ultimate link source.
Links from creating plugins
Now, while great themes might get you a lot of low value footer links, the story is a bit different with plugins. On one hand you don’t usually get links pointing to the homepage with them. You get links to the download page. On the other hand, if it’s a really useful plugin, you might get links from high authority bloggers that might be interested in using it and letting their readers know about it.
A nice example would be the DoFollow plugin, which Yahoo says that it has 3,485 links pointing to that page. Among them, links from Andy Beard, Mashable, ChrisG, LifeHacker, Alex King, Pearsonified. Just some of the blogs that linked to that download page, all from blogs I respect and read (most of them). The links mentioned above are PR4-5 pages on PR5-7 blogs. I’m sure there are more. The DoFollow download page is a PR6.
My $0.02
Considering that a link to one of your articles isn’t just a vote for that page, but a vote and a sign of trust for your domain, my opinion is that making useful plugins is better then creating themes. You get high PR links, from articles dedicated to the plugin, not from footer links on non-relevant pages. You can’t beat that.
And by useful plugins, I do mean useful. Look in your own backyard and see what plugin you need or would like to have. If you think others would use it too, then do it, or pay someone to do it for you.
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