Is my company's privacy policy diluting our SEO efforts?

[SheriGolla]

Good morning! I'm new to the SEOmoz community.

This morning, I spot checked a couple pages using the Term Extractor. When looking at the results, I noticed that we're ranking for many of the terms contained in our privacy policy.

Our privacy policy is set up in the footer of our page templates and appears as a light box that pops up over the page you're viewing, so it looks like every page (from a search engines perspective) contains every word of our 900-word privacy policy.

Since several of our legal terms are showing up as "targeted terms" within the tool, would it benefit me to change the privacy policy link from a light box to something else? Perhaps a link to a static page that contains our privacy policy instead?

Are the search engines smart enough to see the repeating text and ignore it from page to page, or am I just diluting all of my SEO efforts here?

I'm after big wins here, and don't want to be too nitpicky, but concerned this could be a big SEO no-no that I might want to correct.

Thanks in advance for your expertise!

Ben Culbert

[SheriGolla]

Thanks for the helpful advice guys - I appreciate it!

[AdamThompson]

Ben, I would go ahead and change your setup. Having a large amount of duplicate content (that isn't really relevant) across your site certainly isn't going to help, and it could hurt you. I would link to a static page as you mentioned.

[iAnalyst.com]

In the past Matt Cutts has said to nofollow links to pages you don't want to rank in the SERPS. Such as a privacy policy, login page, contact us page.  I believe Google likes to see a privacy policy but you don't need the link followed in order to get credit for it.