The Magento footer links are collected from a few different layout components:

1. About Us | Customer Service
-> cms.xml

These two links are default static blocks taken from the database. To edit them, go to Magento Admin -> CMS -> Static Blocks.

2. Site Map
-> catalog.xml

3. Search Terms | Advanced Search
-> catalogsearch.xml

4. Contact Us
-> contacts.xml

<reference name=”footer_links”> <action method=”addLink” translate=”label title” module=”contacts” ifconfig=”contacts/contacts/enabled”><label>Contact Us</label><url>contacts</url><title>Contact Us</title><prepare>true</prepare></action> </reference>

5. RSS
-> rss.xml

<reference name=”footer_links”> <action method=”addLink” translate=”label title” module=”rss” ifconfig=”rss/config/active”><label>RSS</label><url>rss</url><title>RSS testing</title><prepare>true</prepare><urlParams/><position/><li/> <a>class=”link-feed”</a> </action> </reference>

* 2. Site Map, 3. Search Terms | Advanced Search, 4. Contact Us, and 5. RSS are the HTML links pulled by the function “$this->getLinks()”, not by “$this->getChildHtml(name)”. These links are pulled from a few different places as specified above.

6. To edit the default Magento footer message ” Help Us to Keep Magento Healthy - Report All Bugs (ver. 1.2.1.2) © 2007 Magento Demo Store. All Rights Reserved.”, edit the following file.
-> /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/page/html/footer.phtml

7. To edit the copyright notice ,
-> /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/page/html/footer.phtml