Footer duplicate issue

[GFPC]

I had a question I have been wondering about. You know how many sites have footers with special info like gambling may not be legal in your jurisdiction - and all that blurb stuff.

Is it wise to only allow that content on the homepage and not all inner pages? I notice most sites have it in an include file - so that appears on every page on the site. Is that not considered duplicate content?

Also if you own a network should you use all different wording on each one. I find it hard to come up with 40 different ways of saying the same thing.

What if you owned 400 sites - how would you say the thing 400 times all differently.

Copyscape seems to pick this up well and many sites share same footer lines in the thousands.

Does this not affect your seo? Wondering if its better to avoid those footers - and actually link to an internal page of site with that info thus only showing it one time! And somehow spin it 500 times to look different.

Cant think footers hurt seo for this reason.

Any thoughts.?

[ocreditor]

good question! seems like you are paying good attention to all aspects of your site/s.
as i was reading, i thought the link to an inner page with all relevant information would be a good solution. perhaps you can mix both - somewhat different wording with inner links. mix it up a bit, as much!

i'll follow the replies to this thread hoping to find some good answers on this.

[CityGuard]

Back in June 2010 there was a thread about legal disclaimers at the footer of portal sites, and a second thread with a poll about it. At the time the discussion was about whether people had these footers and what the contents of them were - rather than potential SEO impact - but since it is related I thought I'd mention the threads for those who hadn't seen them before.

• Thread about contents of the disclaimers: https://www.gpwa.org/forum/online-ga...rs-190239.html
• Poll about whether people have a legal notice: https://www.gpwa.org/forum/do-you-ha...es-190277.html

[GFPC]

ocreditor - thanks mate. Yeah can never be to careful with all this duplicate content issues and panda/vince (whatever name they use) updates.
I just have this funny feeling having the same lines on each page may have a little negative effect. Well at least if its written the same for multiple sites.
Its usually around 60-80 words from my tests looking around.

I see 100s of sites using the same lines and it shows large amounts of duplicate issues - mind you most people just accept its needed to have those disclaimers there on the footer.

I wondered if it was better to have it only on the homepage - and not on the rest of the site. And even possible listing a link in the footer pointing each url to the homepage. Or even just have the content on an inner page (no follow) is possible.

I Wish i really know or someone who is versed in the area could tell. I am sure it cant hurt that much but in today's world you have to work on improving your chances little by little to make sure your doing things right.

Awesome CityGuard thanks for that back post info. Will check it out. Maybe ask MR.C what he does, and if he feels its a detriment . Would love to hear his take on it.

[baldidiot]

I'm not sure what I'm basing this on, but I don't think it's an issue. Obviously you're probably not going to rank for the footer, but I don't think it would hinder the page in anyway.

Matt Cutts has a video somewhere talking about boiler plate content - he said they were pretty good at identifying menus, copyright information etc.. as what they were.

Another factor that makes me think it doesn't matter is that I have a user review site, of which about 3,500 listings don't have any reviews yet so pretty much the only unique text is the title, address and phone number (less than 100 words of unique text). Every single one of these pages has an identical disclaimer on it immediately below the reviews (on the advice of the lawyers after someone got shirty about a review) yet these pages still rank well (often on the first page) for search phrases such as "LISTINGNAME reviews".

For example, search "fitness first ilford review" in google.co.uk. There are a bunch of links to fitness first, then one page from wahanda and then my site.

Admittedly this isn't a competitive search phrase, but I think it serves to illustrate the point.

[GFPC]

Ahh some good points! Thank you - yes i watched a video from Cutts regarding this I think a while back and you have reminded me to find it again. I think your right it should not effect the whole site - I guess only one way to tell - is try different things. I am going to test a couple of methods actually, just to be different on several sites - I just do not want 30 sites to have all the same footer.. haha.

Thanks mate for posting your thoughts.

[baldidiot]

No worries mate. Let us know if you discover anything in your testing!

[GFPC]

will do !!

[Chips]

Perhaps if it is in an include file it does not count the same as if it were static on each page? This way the spider sees the .inc file and weighs it accordingly? Just a thought.

[GFPC]

Hey Chips!

Yeah you may be right in that if it is in an include file it would weight it differently. Never thought of that but certainly makes sense. Certainly the same would appear with Seals being in the same sections I would imagine.