A question was posed to Matt Cutts of Google the other day through Google Webmaster Central, “Are links in footers treated differently to paragraph links?” An interesting question indeed.

If you look back to Google’s original Page Rank documents they say that the Page Rank was distributed uniformly throughout the web page. However, Google’s algorithm has evolved and has become more sophisticated over the past couple of years. So yes, Google does definately reserve the right to give preference to footer links over content links or vice versa.

I have seen websites who over do it and load the footer with links with keyword rich anchor text, Google will look at this type of SEO and kick it out as spam.

A good technique to help Google get an idea of your business location is by sticking your address details in the footer. Also, if done correctly and without being too spammy, use keyword targeted anchor text  to direct the bots to your main web pages within your website. In most cases these will be your product pages.

View the video of Matt Cutts answering the question: