Advice from Michael Campbell…
When Michael gives advice, it’s wise to listen. For all those people who have bought templates, from any source, it’s an important message…
“Modify Your Templates or Suffer the Consequences”
It’s not exactly ambiguous, is it? The message is quite clear… you can’t use those templates “as they are” and hope to avoid any penalties from the search engines.
Personally, I’m not sure about this… if you look at most major sites, they’re built around templates. There’s usually a “masthead” graphic, a left-hand navigation menu, some “center of the page” content, and a footer with contact information. Usually only the content part of the page will change… so each page on the site has elements in common.
Perhaps the problem is when multiple sites online, that are otherwise unrelated, have the same site elements? But then, would every site built with XSitePro’s templates be hit with a “template” penalty?
I’ll have to ask Michael to clarify… but, until then, it’s definitely wise to heed his words of wisdom.
(having just done a bit more research, Michael seems to be specifically referring to using templated sites for Adsense revenue. He states that as soon as your publisher ID appears on a site, Google will check it against your other sites with Adsense ads on them, and if it sees a “template pattern” you may get hit with a penalty for having cookie-cutter sites)
