Impact of keyword/keyphrases density on header/footer

[GhillC]

Hi,

It might be a stupid question but I prefer to clear things out if it's not a problem:

Today I've seen a website where visitors are prompted no less than 5 times per page to "call [their] consultants".
This appears twice on the header, once on the side bar (mouse over pop up), once in the body of most of the pages and once in the footer.

So obviously, besides the body of the pages, it appears at least 4 times on every single pages as it's part of the website template.

In the past, I never really wondered re the menu, the footer etc as it's usually not hammering the same stuff repeatedly everywhere.

Anyway, I then had a look at their blog and, given the average length of their articles, the keyword density around these prompts is about 0.5% to 0.8% for each page. This is huge!

So basically my question is as follow: is Google's algorithm smart enough to understand what this is and make abstraction of this "content" to focus on the body of the pages (probably simply focusing on the tags)?

Or does it send wrong signals and confuse search engine more than anything else?

Reading stuff such as this, I wonder how does it work when this is not navigational or links elements.

Thanks,
G

Note: I’m purposely not speaking about the UX which is obviously impacted by such a hammering process.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

does the website rank well for the terms its targeting? if so, don't think google is confused.

<1% is not keyword stuffing and unlikely to trigger any flags.

[GhillC]

It doesn't rank well at all no. But there is a myriad of other problems making it tricky to understand the impact of that one.

<1% is not keyword stuffing indeed but if the keyword targeted and the "noise" created by the prompts and call to actions all over the place is of a comparable volume, what does it tell Google?