The footer is the block at the bottom of a page that repeats across a site. Its links usually cover the pages people look for at the end of a visit: about, careers, contact, security, privacy, terms, status and sometimes a sitemap of product pages. Footer links help users and crawlers, but stuffing footers with keyword-rich links, or placing footer links on other people's sites, has a long history as a spam tactic.
Agency and theme credits
A "Designed by" credit on a client site is a common footer link. If it is part of a paid arrangement or appears across many sites, qualifying it with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" and using a branded anchor rather than a keyword is the safe approach.
Example
Cleaning up a keyword footer
Hypothetical CRM Oakhollow's footer had grown a "Solutions" column with forty keyword-heavy links to near-identical industry pages. The team merged the industry pages into eight solid ones, cut the footer column to those eight with plain names, and moved the rest of the linking into a solutions hub page.
Common mistakes
Using the footer to fix weak internal linking
If important pages only get links from the footer, the site structure needs work. Link them from relevant content and hub pages too.
Questions
Google has not published weightings. Footer links do help discovery, but they say little about any page's specific topic because they appear everywhere.
