Not Giving Credit To Free Software In The Footer

[Baniboy 3]

Well, being around these free website software stuff for a while, I have noticed a trend of sites who don't give credit to the free software they use.Why in the name of anything?! Does it make the site unprofessional? Does it make the visitors think you didn't make the whole site? because you didn't? It's free, the least the users could do is provide a linkback of some sort or credit. But often they manually remove any links between their site and the actual CMS they're using. It's stupid, because you can just visit the admin cpanel folder/file and everything is there. For example gtuts.com, it's using wordpress...

[BuffaloHelp 24]

I don't have an answer for others but as for me, I have removed "designed by" or "powered by" from free templates only because I wanted to limit extra outbound links from my site. I do leave them hidden, such as display:hidden;or <!-- hide the link -->There is another reason I do not share the link is to show somewhat of professionalism. As I say this word I know that it's ironic to hide where credit is due--so unprofessional. Sometimes I like the template but the "mood" of my site and the designer just doesn't go hand in hand. And the designer's site not necessarily reflect the best of my type of business. In a way, I don't want to portray my site was designed by a young punk kid who plasters "death to all" on his/her site. I do realize that this too is so unprofessional by even mentioning a hypothetical situation...A nicely designed template is a good template--despite the designer. I suppose that's when I know I'll remove it. But, often all, I remove "designed by" or "powered by" because I can, and I want to be exclusive with my site and links.

[kobra500 1]

I liked Truefusions reasons, I hadn't thought about that, the main reason is it makes your site look proffession, if you got it from a free website templates site, it is samey, any no. of people could have had that template. If the site doesn't require link backs then it is really up to you, I agree with what you're saying bani but I still think that people sometimes (not always) have good reasons to hide there CMS or there template designer. What if it was a php template, anyone could find the template and then use the code to find a weakness, much like what truefusion said.

[truefusion 3]

Some people remove those footers for security reasons. If a malicious user knew what popular script the site was running and could figure out the version, they could look at change logs from the developers' website and look for exploits. And if the script is free, the malicious user could go through the source code without any financial obstacles and pin point any security flaws. For the example you gave, yeah, if they remove that part from the footer for security reasons, they should at least do more, like changing the default path of the administrator's log-in page.

[Baniboy 3]

But anyone into website hacking could find out by the head tag if you're using wordpress or not(may apply on other CMSs). As for me, I don't link to anything in my footer, I just willingly add powered by wordpress text in there(you can have a look at it, hint hint ). For punk kids doing templates. It shouldn't matter. It's still the right thing to do. For example, let's think you made a nice template and gave it free to everyone. The only thing you would require would be a simple linkback or at least the mentioning of your name. If the license of the template enforces this, it's illegal (and wrong) not to do so.tf, you have made a CMS(which I couldn't download btw for some odd reason ). I'm not sure if you want people to keep the footer content "Powered by TrueFusion CMS 0.9.7" in the footer, but I'm sure you would prefer that people do?(it sounds all spooky and weird too; "truefusion" ).As for outbound links. Using display:hidden; can't help SEO, because search engines don't understand CSS if I'm not wrong. They view the site as lynx would(or something). I don't know if hiding in HTML helps either. Anyway, that stuff(CMS version, name, etc) shows up in your meta generator tag unless you strip it.

[k_nitin_r 8]

I tend to leave the WordPress tagline on my blog as well as the footer signature that the theme developer added in. However, I do think the link that the theme developer adds to the footer may link to a page that does not reflect my views or linking to another page may affect the PageRank assigned by Google's search engine and may negatively impact ranking by other search engines as well. I will not go into the concepts of SEO, but essentially if your website links to other websites randomly, the search engines lower the ranking of the page in the same fashion as it does for the parked domain pages that have little content and simply link to other websites.A signature or tagline from the author or the originating project, however, is pretty much harmless apart from the fact that it advertises what your site uses to scriptkiddies just itching to try out their cracking tools to deface websites.

[truefusion 3]

tf, you have made a CMS(which I couldn't download btw for some odd reason ). I'm not sure if you want people to keep the footer content "Powered by TrueFusion CMS 0.9.7" in the footer, but I'm sure you would prefer that people do?(it sounds all spooky and weird too; "truefusion" ).

Well, they don't have to have it there, it just would be nice to know that someone else is using my CMS too—it's not necessarily a self-promoting technique. There are other ways i can find out, though, if they are using my CMS, like if they were to submit bug reports or suggestions. (By the way, the only way to currently download my CMS is through Subversion.)

As for outbound links. Using display:hidden; can't help SEO, because search engines don't understand CSS if I'm not wrong. They view the site as lynx would(or something).

Search engines parse the HTML of websites, which will practically always be visible. CSS and JavaScript are irrelevant to them (unless perhaps they cache the web page).