I have a paragraph that I want on the bottom of every page of my site, that contains my main keywords, unavoidably. Does anyone know if google penalizes or ignores text within the footers?
On about 200 pages of my website I have an identical, or nearly identical, paragraph that closes out the page. No problem so far with Google. I think their algorithm easily figures out that this type of repeated footer content is sometimes appropriate, and they just ignore it as duplicate content.
Also I have a website with some text that appears on every page, and everything is ok - I am on first page on Google.
Excellent reply green rep added. I would say that it may not harm you if the ratio of overall page content is over the duplicated paragraph in both header and footer. If this kind of on-page factor can cause the penalty so easily, then all, each and every websites that has a same header text and same footer copyright text would be penalized already.
Humm, then maybe I might have been a little too generous in the use of my keywords on the paragraph then.