I looked through old posts trying to find something on this but as SEO policies are forever changing it shouldn't hurt to re-address the situation...

On some sites I see on every page, in the the side column to the bottom, a collection of words of varied font size, that appear to be related to the page's keywords.

My question is what use is this and surely it would be penalised and if not why not?

Also on the bottom of many sites, especially those of the Wordpress template persuasion, I see a table of contents that is more often than not used to generate anchors for keywords. Again, is this practice penalised and if not why not, especially when it's also adding a lot of repetitive content to every page?