Does Google see sidebar/footer linked articles as a weaker cluster?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Josh Levenson: I don`t know what a cluster is. But links in the main content tend to hold more weight than links in boilerplate.
  
  
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  Ben Bar: It is now obvious that the search engine gives more value to a link in the body of the page, or even above the waterline, than a link in the sidebar or footer.
  
  A few years ago, when Google first started, the crawler didn`t pay much attention to this, but it has updated its models to make the value scale of a link more natural.
  
  (we are less likely to click on a link in the footer, aren`t we?)
  
  To see a little more clearly, there is this excellent article by Bill Slawsky
  
  https://www.seobythesea.com/.../googles-reasonable.../
  
  SEOBYTHESEA.COMGoogle`s Reasonable Surfer Model: How Link Value Differs Based on Link, Document Features and User DataGoogle`s Reasonable Surfer Model: How Link Value Differs Based on Link, Document Features and User Data
  
  
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  Tim O`Donnell: Ben Bar thanks
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: The footer area of a page, more than any other not specifically ad space, has the lowest possible value for links, as it is traditionally where all those links go which we had to include somewhere, but don`t expect anyone to ever click - things like a T&C page, the sitemap, cookie policy, and sometimes the design company that built the site.
  
  Because of this, and also a period of footer links spam in the noughties, where a page only has links from page footers, it may be deemed as a low interest, low value page. There are, even today, companies building WordPress themes that carry links in the footer, either to the theme-maker, or in some cases, to whoever paid the makers for a paid link there.
  
  In fact, sites which have a large proportion of whatever inbound links and citations they have coming mostly from footer links on other sites, may be deemed `low quality`, which is kind of the polite way of saying it may have a negative effect on the site overall. That is, of course, more about cross-domain links when we talk about quality scoring.
  
  Sidebars, when specific to a page, rather than a template or boilerplate content area can be regarded as part of the main content, or at least pretty close in terms of value.