The culprit this time is Blogstheme.com, which is a site that supposedly offers free downloads of “premium” WordPress themes. What most users don’t know is that the guys at Blogstheme.com have already modified the footer.php file of each theme. They’ve edited the WordPress link and instead of it linking back to WordPress.org, it links back to their site blogstheme.com.

I’m not giving them any link love but if you wanna check them out you’ll see that they’ve done a good job of collecting attractive and well-designed WordPress themes. One thing that I immediately noticed in their site was their tag line – Get premium WordPress themes for FREE! It’s their style of tricking new WordPress users into downloading themes from their site. But if you know your stuff, you’ll know that it’s silly because all those themes that they have in their site are offered for free by the theme authors themselves.

I’m sure this won’t be the last time we’ll hear of something like this and I’m sure there are also other sites doing the same thing. The next time you want to download a public WordPress theme, make sure you download it from a reliable source like the theme author’s website, the theme’s own download page or from Themes Viewer. If you wanna play safe, NEVER download a WordPress theme from third party site. Better safe than sorry!

Where do you download WordPress themes? Have you or anyone you know downloaded/used a theme from Blogstheme.com? Did you have any experience downloading and using a modified WordPress theme containing spam links? What safety measures do you take when downloading/using a WordPress theme? Share your thoughts!