Why Do I Recommend Premium Themes for your Wordpress Blog?
There is a lots of reasons Why I recommend everyone to use Premium wordpress Themes other than Free or Nulled Premium Themes. In this post, I will explain you about the defects of using a Free Wordpress Theme or a Cracked (Nulled) Wordpress Theme.
Footer Link
Most of the Free Wordpress Themes has a Footer text which links to the website of the Theme creator. This shows that the Wordpress Theme is fully owned by the specific Theme Creator. After all, if the link is not related to your blog content, Google will penalize you for bad link neighborhood. I have already published a post about the Importance of Linking to Related Content Sites. Most Probably there will be links to more than 2 sites other than Wordpress link. This will increase the number of External Links in a Page. Anyway, I recommend keeping the link to Wordpress Official Website.
If you are thinking about removing the links without the authors permission, PLEASE DON’T DO THAT! By doing that, you are breaking the license rule of the Specific Wordpess Theme. It is a Punishable offense.
More Usability – Not at all Unique
If at all a Wordpress theme is Fully Free without links, there will be a lots of users for that theme. If you want to stand apart as a unique blog from others, you should need a Premium Wordpress Theme which is not be used by others (Most probably).
There will be a lot more features for Premium Wordpress Themes than Free Themes. So, I recommend you to Go with Premium Wordpress themes.
This is good advice for any new blogger. I am agree with you that there are more advantages of using premium templates than free.
I do not believe there is any legal requirement for a live link. At most you need to attribute the “original” design work they did on the site. There are excellent free themes and crap as well as excellent premium themes. the only real value I see in premium themes are to the extent the authors provide support for tweaking them to your specific preferences.
What you told is right. But There is also a lots of free themes with good Customer Preference support (constructor wordpress theme). Anyway, it will not come up to a Premium Theme.