My home page has very little real text on it (none in fact) so Google just reads a bunch of internal links at the moment. I have added a footer of 121 words to the index file which now shows across all pages on the site, many other pages have plenty of text and content. Will Google penalise me for duplicating that 121 word footer across the site?
Google do penalise for duplicate content within same domain, but if your other pages have contents updating regularly then may be an exception but not sure.
Well to be honest I've heard duplicate content is myth,but it's always better to be on the safer side
I would suggest you put those words in the META data of your HTML file so that they are not counted as duplicate content while doing the job of telling the Search Engines what the page is meant for. Example of a META data for keywords: <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" /> HTML: you have to put this in between the <head> and </head> tags of your HTML file. More about this on Wikipedia.
Of course duplicate content is not right. You will never show up in SERPS at good results, unless you have good unique content.
I would agree, duplicate content is not right, it is easy to change the content of a page, make each page unique!
I am talking about a footer. All my pages have unique content (the home page just does not have much / any text). My question is whether having 100 words of the same content in a footer will cause me problems?
I wouldn't worry about that at all. Just think of big cooperation companies. I am positive they all have duplicate content. You will be fine. Good Luck
You either have good content, or you don't. If your homepage has no content on it, I'd suggest modifying your sitemap to rate the homepage lower and other pages higher for importance. If you have good content, your pages will rank well. If you don't, they won't. It has nothing to do with 121 word footer that may be on all pages, it won't be a problem unless that's the bulk of your content. But then its not the footer being a problem, the problem is the lack of content.
I know that is what you wanted to hear... But I strongly advise you to push in some unique content in the main body of your pages. Google will not penalize you if you are using the same footers, but it will have a bad effect if you put it in your headers since crawlers prefer to focus on your first 120-150 characters.
Why put in a duplicate content when you can make your own unique one? Don't let laziness get into you!