Sharing can destroy your reputation in three seconds or less.
OK, let me back up and describe what you need to do in order to protect your reputation from complete decimation.
I’m talking about ‘freebies’ you share with people, like WordPress themes, reports and newsletters.
Good Intentions…Malicious Behavior
The reason some businesses and bloggers are finding out the hard way that sharing is dangerous has to do with ‘link bait’. Link bait is a strategy of giving something away or saying something incredibly provocative in order to get a huge amount of inbound links.
Recently people with a little HTML coding skill have designed custom templates people can use on their WordPress blogs. The benefit to the user is a free ‘skin’ that makes their website look good, and the person who shares it includes a link to their own site in this skin.
Win-Win, right?
Wrong.
The problem is the people who download your theme — like porn sites and casinos. When they link to you in large numbers it can seriously screw up your reputation and even give the Google bots a reason to suspect your website of spamming.
A safer alternative to building links is asking for them. Another solid way to grow inbound links is to post thoughtful comments on other blogs, use contact forms, and build a rich social presence. If you want to share themes that’s still acceptable, just offer them to people whose sites you consider valuable links instead of posting them for free download to anyone.
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