The items in the footer area are in two different locations. One part is a static block created within the magento admin area (CMS > Static Block). The other part is held in the related .phtml / .php / .xml files within the design files.

First off, the XML files

app/design/frontend/*/*/layout/page.xml
Here you will find some footer reference:

app/design/frontend/*/*/layout/cms.xml

footer_links

You can see that the footer area of each page (page.xml) adds footer links via:
app/design/frontend/*/*/template/page/html/footer.phtml
This file (footer.phtml) contains a method to get it’s children HTML as referenced in the page.xml file – ($this->getChildHtml();)
-app/design/frontend/*/*/template/page/switch.phtml
-app/design/frontend/*/*/template/page/template/links.phtml
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