Hi Folks, I have been working on an Ecommerce portal (studiorudraksh.com) that has an uniform footer with useful links and some content. Now since the footer has some content (About Us info)on it, it appears to be same on all the website pages. So my questions here are: Is it a good idea to have uniform content across all website pages through footer? Whether this is a good strategy to promote your website or About us info? Will my website be susceptible to any Google penalty due to similar content across website pages? If yes, then the same rule should be applicable to known sites like Snapdeal, Zovi.com which are also using the similar strategy. Since E commerce portals do not have much content on website pages, so will the uniform content on Footer help improve the website's performance in search engines? While this are some of the queries, the most being the third one: whether my website be susceptible to any Google Updates/Penalty? I kindly request all the Seo experts on the board to help me get rid off the above mentioned queries. Thanks in advance, Rahul
Hi Rahul, Elements of the website like the header, footer, and any framing/border elements are typically duplicated from page to page. (Your site looks excellent, by the way.) Even still - Google isn't super quick to penalize a site just because you've got duplicate content. Especially if you're an eCommerce website. They kinda get that you're going to have a bunch of product descriptions and other content that is very similar from piece to piece. (I'll talk about how to undercut that in a moment, too.) For your footer -- especially with an eCommerce site -- it's helpful to give a good picture of the site's contents. Basically, you want a sitemap, but one that's specifically tailored to the customer, and not to a search engine, like sitemaps have a tendency to be. Make it super easy for the customer to see all the different sections/categories that are in your store. Here are a couple of helpful links I dug up: http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/006665.php http://www.highrankings.com/footer-links-349 http://www.highrankings.com/18-seo-killers-345 When it comes to eCommerce, probably one of the best ways to make sure you're not going to see any penalties or anything for duplicate content is to make sure that you've got a blog on your site. I think that your site could easily support a lifestyle blog, and Google REALLY likes high-quality, original, informative content. If you can make that happen, your site will shoot up the search engine results, almost guaranteed.
A header and footer by definition are repeated and consistent across all the pages of your website, so you won't be penalised in any way. As Solid Commerce suggests, make your footer helpful, directing users to the main categories of your site with ease and include some schema.org info to help the search engines along a little more.