Duplicate Content Discovery

[cbielich]

I was hit with Penguin on April 24th like a ton of bricks. Luckily my cash cow keyword was kept safe and still is today with even an increase in traffic over the year. With some other main keywords I used to rank far I fell off the board on that day. Since then I have been slowly trying to clean things up as much as I know

Today I was sitting down with my coffee and Penguin mindset and I decided to use copyscape again to review duplicate content issues and something I noticed which I either didn't before or didn't think was an issue was my footer. In my footer I used a blurb from some other site in my niche a long time ago. Which I discovered they used from one of the main sites in my niche. Anyways I noticed that my footer is what kept coming up as being duplicate content and was always at an overage of 28% according to copyscape.

My question is should I be worried about the footer?

Is 28% a lot?

[TomRayner]

I wouldn't worry about it too much, as for some websites it's simply a necessity.  In some financial verticals, you need to display a (usually very long) risk warning/disclaimer on each page.  I've yet to see a site penalised for something like that.

My concern with footers would be exact-match anchor texts which are still dofollow, particulary for external links.  I've seen reconsideration requests finally be accepted after webmasters have changed those links to nofollow.

If you're concerned with the size of the footer versus the ratio of unique content, you could always consider putting any essential must-be-on-page information in the form of an image.  May increase load time on the page slightly, but could put your mind at ease over it.

To be honest, however, I wouldn't worry about it a great deal - I'd be more concerned with how the footer links around.

[ske11]

I agree with Tom that you should be fine as your competitors will be in a similar situation as the test is required by law.

If you are still concerned a couple of ways around it could be to have the legal info as an I-frame so it is not seen by Google as part of the page (but they may consider it a work around spam and in the future it may be something they target (Just trying to be whiter than white hat))

The other way around it that I do not see as being an issue in the future is to have the legal text as an image, so your visitors can read it but it is labeled as legal information to the search engines.

I hope this helps

Sean