Pre-Populated WP Themes -- Am I Being Spammed?

[keyon]

I was trying out a premium WP theme the other day that had a feature where I could "pre-populate" the blog with dummy images, posts, categories, thumbnails, etc. -- the idea being this would help me get a better idea of how the blog should look once my own content is in place.

Once I had everything installed, I noticed the "pre-populated" content also included 70 approved comments -- each with its own url that pointed to some fairly spammy-looking websites.

Is this some kind of a SEO trick? I can imagine that lots of people install blogs using premium themes, but maybe take a awhile to get around to replacing the content with their own. In the meantime, thousands of real links are unknowingly published on the Web without the blog owners even knowing it. Am I imagining things?

[williamc]

pretty shady at the very least I would say.

[keyon]

pretty shady at the very least I would say.
That's what I was thinking....oh well, I've dumped them anyway -- for a number of other reasons. I just don't think they were being very elegant, if you get my drift.

[deepsand]

Is this some kind of a SEO trick? I can imagine that lots of people install blogs using premium themes, but maybe take a awhile to get around to replacing the content with their own. In the meantime, thousands of real links are unknowingly published on the Web without the blog owners even knowing it. Am I imagining things?
Only if your eyes are untrustworthy.

The only surprise to me would be were this is the one and only instance of such a smarmy practice.

[keyon]

Hopefully this post can be a word of warning -- when installing "pre-populated" themes, be sure to delete all the garbage that might come with it -- namely:

1) Pre-populated posts and comments.
2) Pre-set tags and meta data

Or better, just don't install pre-populated data at all.