Sitewide Footer Backlinks - Thoughts?

Just a quick one to see peoples thoughts.

We've secured a site wide footer backlink from a seriously high authority site, it's do follow and it's meant that GSC has picked up 106k links.

Do you think we will be penalised for this, or get away with it due to the authority of the site? It's also relevant & it's part of a larger "group" of companies that are linked to in the footer.

I know way back when, when google went mental with manual penalties for site wide links and such it would have caused an issue, but not sure about now.

106K link will completely obliterate your anchor ratios and do significantly more damage than benefit. Get a regular backlink from the site if you want, but sitewide footer link is a nope in my book.

It's branded anchor text & surely Google is smarter than that, when looking at "anchor text ratios" they will split it out per domain as opposed to an overall

Google probably considers a footer link as one link by now. Those 106k pages are probably considered as a single link.

Yeah - That's my assumption, that there smart enough to understand that, post penguin 4.0

Yep. Google "understand" footer links as they are widely used for sponsor logos and such.

I don't see any issues with that at all. I have something similar in place and haven't had any problems with Google.