milosevic - 1:15 pm on May 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have heard rumours that Google at some point did pick up on things like id="footer", when they first started evaluating content based on page context (the 'intelligent surfer' model). But I think that their algorithms are likely sophisticated enough now to determine the relative significance of regions of a page without such cues.

However, semantic naming in markup is always a good thing in my book and is part of what HTML5 is aiming to achieve with elements like <article> and <aside>.