Does including a paragraph in the footer help seo at all?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Unique Websites: Nowadays, does including a paragraph in the footer (NO LINKS, just a couple of sentences) which summarise the individual content for that INDIVIDUAL PAGE, help seo at all, hinder it or make no difference?
  
  I am converting an old, well-ranking website into a Wordpress one (with a new design).
  
  The old site has a section in the footer of each page which describes (again) the major services of the individual page - obviously this repeats many of the service and location keywords for that particular page.
  
  Should I allow space for this in the new site? I've read that footer keywords are now not helpful/desirable - but is the site likely to lose any rankings if I miss them out? Are they (even a small) positive ranking factor still?
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  Edwin Jonk: Both Google and Bing try to guess the boilerplate and try not to rank a page for the complementary stuff. Therefore, it doesn't really matter that much and it is more about if it makes sense for the user.
  
  That said, footer content and (thereby) footer links are normal and all over the web. But keep in mind that the content/links should be complementary in the sense that it isn't huge or linking to un-relevant pages like linking outside the site. For example:
  
  footer links are a dead end, and why in the name of all that’s useful in business would a company put a link to another site in their header? Unless they were, I don’t know, paid to do it? [1]
  
  Furthermore normally footer links aren't clicked on very frequently.
  
  [1] ;http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2014/01/31/link-fixation-what-to-know-what-to-do/
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  Unique Websites: +Edwin Jonk ;Many thanks for link; useful - I hadn't seen that before.
  
  What I was really asking, however, is whether footer CONTENT has any benefit to your seo - eg whether it reinforces the page's keywords a little bit? (Obviously, content at the top of the page is best - is the footer content helpful at all or just useless?)