Text in Site-Wide Footer Cause Dupe Content Issues?

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Text in Site-Wide Footer Cause Dupe Content Issues?

simonnreynolds

3:16 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

I have a website that has a (200 word / 2 Paragraphs) SEO optimised block of text that sits in the footer of the website. And therefore is present on every page.
Usually a bit of content in sitewide footers are fine and this has quite effective for the home page. But as this site was affected by Panda, im worried that this is one of the flags to Google.

Do you guys think i should remove it from the footer and just keep it on the homepage?

koan

4:48 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

I would trim that text down to the bare minimum, for sure. 200 words is a bit much.

BeeDeeDubbleU

8:25 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

Why not change it on every page? Is your site too big?

Planet13

9:03 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

...SEO optimised block of text...

Could you elaborate a little more on that? Because it sounds like very old-school content spam.

It's the SAME text on EVERY page, right?

tristanperry

9:14 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm surprised the site wasn't flagged pre-Panda. 200 words of (what I assume is) content with keywords thrown in - on very single page?

Forget Google for a second. Does the content improve the user experience and quality of each individual page?

BeeDeeDubbleU

9:25 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm surprised the site wasn't flagged pre-Panda. 200 words of (what I assume is) content with keywords thrown in - on very single page?

I don't think it happens that way. 200 words is only about eight lines on a forum thread here. It is not that unusual for a site to repeat a tract of text on each page, for example a mission statement or something. Google is wise enough to recognise this.

indyank

9:38 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

i am not sure what you mean by SEO optimized text in the footer. In general, I don't think boilerplate text would affect the site. For example, if you have a recent posts widget on the sidebar, would that be considered as duplicate content? I don't think so.

almighty monkey

11:37 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm surprised the site wasn't flagged pre-Panda.

This. Good lord, this. Text that is at the bottom, in a small font, often not a million miles away from the background on the colour scale is pretty clearly not important to your users and would of largely been devalued, if not outright penalised, by Google years ago. If you've keyword stuffed it to boot....I could write an algorithm that could detect that. And I'm an utter moron.

Put it this way - It was never doing you any good, and since panda may well be doing you some bad. There's no reason to keep it.