Interview with Yahoo Insider reveals footer links downgrade
Search Engine Watch has the breakdown of an interview with a Yahoo heavyweight, the gist of the interview is below The footer links discount is the same with Google, still more incentive to get links on page, perhaps
Footer (bottom page links) may not be used for ranking purposes, but will be used for crawling and discovery
Yahoo uses both human and algorithmic approaches to detect spam and fight spam
Some spammy sites will still be included in the index but won’t rank well, outside of navigational queries (like searching for the site’s name)
Yahoo doesn’t automatically discount paid links
Links in quantity are less important these days