How useful/ damaging is it to have links repeated on every page ?

[AJMKristi]

Our site is dynamic in nature we have tens of thousands of indexed pages with  numerous individual brands pages - all of the brand pages are equally important.

We are trying to distribute link juice to those pages as much as possible - so my question is --- Is it smart and or useful or perhaps damaging or spammy to have a space on the bottom of each page throughout our site with links to each and every single brand page ? is this practice considered as duplicate content etc ?

[irvingw]

It's still viable.

In regard to your points

1. 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.

2. 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/

[AJMKristi]

Thank you for the awesome response - i appreciate it.

The thing is - though its true that nearly all the targeted pages are fully optimized (URL, title tag, H1, etc) and the links are globally placed in the footer...

couple things to point out:

1. All of the footers are identical repeated on every page across the site
2. the links are displayed as a list of brands not as a piece of of content instead its all just text links with the anchors being Ford cars, GM Cars, etc;

I know this was a pretty soild way to control the link juice a few years back - im just wondering if thats still the case ? or is it actually a negative thing to do and can it cause more harm than good.

Thank you

[irvingw]

That is called a robots nav, and it is a good SEO strategy for passing PR to MAIN pages you are targeting while not being something that draws attention to the user to click on. Strictly made to pass PR.

Look how this site is doing it in their footer. There are 6 links in that footer all perfectly targeted with anchor text, pointing to perfectly targeted pages (URL, title tag, H1, Etc)

http://www.onlinemedicaltourism.com/

Serving information to the medical tourism community, OnlineMedicalTourism.com helps you find information and services regarding medical travel, including overseas facilities that address your specific needs. We do not rate or recommend medical tourism facilities or medical travel services for quality of care, but rather act as an information clearing house so that medical tourists can locate the services they require. We recommend that you read more about medical tourism costs and the risks of medical tourism. The information on this site is posted by the facilities and medical tourism providers - OnlineMedicalTourism.com is not responsible for inaccuracies they create.

That being said, I would only do this on main targeted pages and not include dozens of links. Since this is a global footer you don't want it to be too long. It needs to be only a small percentage of the content on the page so that it does not appear to be duplicate content on all of the pages.