I see a growing trend that people are cramming a lot of useless information in their footers. This seems like it is actually extremely counterproductive to SEO. Am I right?
I have the same question about this, I was doing the same and decided to remove it all. I haven't noticed any positive after I did it but I think my traffic might have decreased who knows..
I use footer to serve as a secondary navigation bar for my website. If i only have few pages in my site, i place it there, too.
Well, when you use free Wordpress templates a lot of this templates include a footer with the sponsors links, of course you can remove this links but it's not ethical.
If you have placed your link on good designs than then you can receive nice traffic . What most people do is that when they visit any blog and like that template or theme they start running for footer side so they can also have such theme or template .
Personally, I don't put any keywords,useless information in the footer. I just put the copyright information.
If you have an e-shop then according to usability guru's it's better to put in your footer only copy of the sidebar. But if you have just some kind of informational site then I think it doesn't matter.
I have adsense link unit in my footer with additional important links such as contact me, term of service and etc. It makes good money for me. Here you can look at my page: Inspect your Article
I think if its keep clean and not spammy it a good method Something like link | link | link | link | link | link Doing graphic designs since 1995 Copyright Sitename Gives some other links for google to pick up on also a way to throw a couple keywords in
lots of people cram keywords into the footer section of their site, but why? Google is clear that it penalises keyword stuffing, personally i think it is a waste of time. It would be better to write a quality post with those keywords contained within it
I'm speaking toward blogs more than traditional websites. I see a lot of blogs with footers that contain 20 or more links. I'm guessing affiliation plays a large roll.