Gary Illyes from Google responded to a tweet last week on Twitter mocking "SEO experts" who place massive amounts of text on their footer. He said those are the same SEO experts who complaint they were hit by some sort of update.
Here is Gary's Tweet:
Interestingly, mostly loud, self proclaimed "best SEOs" implement that and then they complain about being hit by some update.
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 28, 2017
The example given by Avinash Murthy was this screen shot:
It doesn't look "massive" to me but it does seem unnecessary and that no one will really read it.
This lead to a longer rant by Gary Illyes but in short, he is saying this was done not for users but for search engines. Things like that don't work and aren't for the best of your web site. Here he gets into it more:
It's not. It's just batshit stupid.
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 28, 2017
Why add content below your footer if no one will read it?
Forum discussion at Twitter.