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It's still viable. In regard to your points If you were to include a large footer on tons of pages with little content that would not be good, but a small footer repeated on pages with a lot of content is fine. Also, supposedly Google looks at common code globally on pages and strips it away from the equation (boilerplate) They still follow the links and pass PR but just don't take the external template stuff into major consideration. So your main content section is mostly what is being graded to determine rankings. Well Google likes anchor text within content, so if it fits what you are doing, then within content is better, but a list will not hurt. If you have MANY items it gets very sloppy looking, so in that case I would suggest using  jquery like this site does, this way you can get all of the links on the page in a SEO friendly way, ensuring they will all get spidered and pass PR without making a bad visual/user experience with tons of links on the bottom of the page.You can see when you click on a section in the footer it then expands to show the links for that section, very elegant. http://www.healthgrades.com/