Is it worth designing free styles?

[Kuya]

Hi,

Recently I started designing vbulletin styles as a means to get to know the software better and also generate backlinks, and also I have moved to a new url and changed my forums domain name, making the creation of links more important now than before.

However, I notice most forum owners remove the links within the footer and so it makes my work a waste of time if they do this. One example is a site that had over 8,000 pages and uses one of my templates as it's main skin, so that is 8,000 links that has been removed (but not until Googlebots indexed the ones that allowed me to see this in webmaster tools).

So, is it worth it?

I am working on a couple of other styles, one designed with Mixed Martial Arts in mind and another based on English Football teams (soccer teams), but if people just remove the links then How do I benefit?