In reply to Brin Wilson.

The primary problem is that these kinds of affiliate marketing pages do not take quality into account. They call them the "best" themes, but actually they're just the latest themes which have an affiliate program they're signed up to (like mine or, mostly, ThemeForest). The customer is being duped (frankly, this is part of sales in almost any industry).

In an ideal world, I think prominent theme shops for a category would be listed alongside articles with well-researched and reasoned lists of good themes. As a purely arbitrary choice, let's take "best real estate themes", for example.

I'd expect that all of the big marketplaces with appropriate category pages (TF/Creative Market/Mojo) would be listed alongside some of the respected players who have appropriate products (Studiopress, Elegant Themes, WooThemes). I'd expect that because they're known and probably referenced and linked to elsewhere. And if there are any smaller shops specialising in this, I'd hope they'd have a chance to be competitive in the rankings too, since it should be their speciality. (This is actually a critical problem for niche shops. It's very difficult to rank competitively in Google because your niche is crowded out by larger actors.)

Alongside the actual product sites, it'd be nice to see some value-adding posts around what makes a real estate theme effective, which themes have appropriate features and design principles for that market, etc. Think of what Chris Lema does for plugins, for example. I'm not aware of anyone doing similar things for niche themes.

I'm not privy to the techniques affiliate marketers use to rank their sites so highly. But clearly Google has trouble distinguishing between a post that really answers questions about the best product for the job, and a post that's merely listing products the author might make money on. So I don't expect to see my vision come to fruition any time soon.