This week, we had two different Googlers answer questions about link placement on a web page and how it differs having links in your main body content versus links in your footer, header, boilerplate content, etc.
Zineb from Google answered it on Twitter on January 25th in French saying:
So sitewide header and footer links seem to be given less weight by Google, which is common sense to most of you out there.
John Mueller of Google answered it yesterday in a Google Hangout at the 22 minute mark saying:
He goes on a bit more, so you can listen to the whole thing:
