Putting a link to your site in your free-for-distribution site skins.

Good idea?

[Smashing Young Man]

I'm a highly in demand developer of vBulletin forum skins. Heretofore I've only done paid one-off jobs for individual clients.

Lately, I've been considering developing a couple of free themes to distribute at vBulletindotOrg, with the only usage stipulation being that an innocuous link which I would place in the footer be left intact.

The link would point to a tightly-focused site of mine, which has nothing to do with my web and graphic design work. Would this be helpful or harmful? I'm pretty confident that I would get a heap of inbound links as my skins are well-liked, but practically none of the links would be on a site which is relevant to mine, so I'm not fully sure what the effect would be.

What would the search engines think and how would it effect my rankings on my targeted keywords? I'm reasonably sure that over time I'll get a few direct referrals which will find my site interesting and stick around, but that wouldn't be worth it if it harms my site in other ways.

What say you all?

[jchampliaud]

You might get a lot of inbound links but if they aren't related to your site then I don't think it will help in the SEs.
I remember someone here saying (I can't remember the thread) awhile ago they did something like this and it brought in little traffic. I think they put a link on every site they built. It might be different for you if your skins are really popular.
I say try it and if possible keep us updated.