Have You Put Your Wordpress Blog at Risk?

Every day, many self hosted Wordpress blog owners use search engines to find new and attractive themes for their blogs. Some bloggers settle for free themes while some go for pirated editions of premium wordpress themes. But what many of them doesn't know is that they are unknowingly putting their beloved blogs into possibilities of high risk. Even if there's no big risk, there's enough chance that you're sending outgoing links to some sites which you don't know at all. Yes, you maybe giving back links to evil people who stole links from your site without telling you.

How? You  may ask. Siobhan Ambrose has written an excellent article "Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes", go and read it carefully. Siobhan has cited examples for you to see and understand every risk that blog admins put their blogs into. Also a tip from Siobhan -

A legitimate site offering free WordPress themes will not have the word “WordPress” in its url. WordPress is trademarked and if a site is going to violate trademarks it’s likely to be unscrupulous about inserting spam and other code into themes.

Next, Lorelle on Wordpress also writes "Are You Risking Your Blog With an Unofficial or Vulnerable WordPress Theme?" Lorelle informs that Recently, Automattic and WordPress decided to clean up the WordPress Themes Viewer, removing all the “sponsored Themes” from its database.

Well, off course this doesn't mean every theme designer is trying to hack into your blog's theme and get away some advantage. But it is useful to watch out for the ugly guys of Internet. Because, obtaining back links is almost like a fever now. Everyone is trying new ideas to get back links.

While using pirated editions of premium themes, its even more risky. People who rip off premium themes actually pay some amount to grab the first original copy, then they work on it and maybe some of them put malicious codes inside.

How would you know? The easiest way is to install the exploit scanner plugin. That will give you the overview of suspicious codes which may be laid inside the theme. There are often some false warnings.

But the main thing is, blog admins who aren't quite comfortable handling the internal code structure of wordpress themes may not be able to detect anything. And who doesn't know that unsuspecting blog admins are the prime targets here?