Millions of backlinks through sitewide footers is not seen as a good thing for PR benefit. ALL footer links will soon be useless.
I and a couple of other people including Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, Mike Greghan & Ammon Johns, spoke to Matt Cutts about 3 years ago in London SES, and we all agreed that links in small text at the foot of a page are pretty much worthless spam, UNLESS they are internal links when they become very important as they are a site map!
read into that what you will
