Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links?

Matt's answer:

Ok, we have a question from Andres in Boston,  MA, who asks: Does Google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded  by text, for example in a paragraph? Well, if you go back and read the original Page  Rank paper, they said that links were distributed completely uniformly, PR was distributed,  you know, without regard to whether the link was at the top of the page, at the bottom  of the page, in the footer, in the text, all that sort of stuff. In general our link  analysis continues to get more and more sophisticated to the point where what we compute today is  still called PR and still bears resemblance to the original PR but it’s much more sophisticated  that the original PR used to be. So we do reserve the right to treat links in footers  a little bit differently. For example, if something’s in a footer, it might not carry  the same editorial weight, because someone might have set up a single link and it might  be something that’s across the entire site whereas something that’s in an actual  paragraph of text is a little more likely to be an editorial link, so we do reserve  the right to treat those links differently in terms of how we consider them for relevance,  how we consider them for reputation, how much we trust them and all those sorts of  things.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: