Should You Stuff Content On Your Footer?

One thing that most webmasters complain about is lack of enough real estate on their web pages to include SEO content. If you work for a company that has a flash site, you know exactly what I mean. You have to either get rid of flash (which the CEO will probably won’t like) or find a way to add some text to your pages.

One approach that I have seen being used by a few SEO professionals is stuffing the footer section with 2 or 3 paragraphs of text. The argument here is that less than 5% of people actually look there, so you are not leaving a bad impression for most of your customers. Besides, search engines don’t care where the text is, right?

The problem with this approach is that you are putting text on your pages not to add value but to trick the engines. Now this is not Black Hat or anything like that, so the chances are that you are not going to get banned. You may get slapped however if your site is visited by a Google agent (real people). I know people use CSS to put content on the header but make it show up on the footer all sneaky techniques right that. I guess what it comes down to is how comfortable your company is with such approach. I personally find this approach to reflect poorly on my brand, so I don’t go over 3 lines of text on my footer (max). But I guess if you are fine with this sneaky approach, you should try it. One thing that I suggest you do is provide real content and not just keywords in your footer as keyword stuffing will definitely get you banned.