Headers & Footers Count As Duplicate Content

[CyberAlien]

I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website.

A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website.  Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking?

My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation.

Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?

[TakeshiYoung]

Google can easily identify navigational elements that appear on every page, and will ignore those for the purposes of identifying duplicate content. You don't need to be worried about your navigation being flagged as duplicate content, that's a standard feature of most websites.

That being said, you can be penalized for having lots of pages with little or no content (Panda). You'll want to make sure all the pages on your site provide some kind of actual value.

[Crocodesign]

You can use the new HTML5 tags

<header>

<footer>

<aside>.
They work the same as a, but give more information to Google.

• http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_header.asp (Header)
• http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_footer.asp (Footer)
• http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_aside.asp (Sidebar)

</aside>

</footer>

</header>