Help! Someone's inserted my link in the footer of another site!

[Jeepster]

There's a site in my industry where (I'm guessing on flawed SEO advice) all of their pages contain footer links to rival sites – with each page containing a different set of links.

One page has a link to my site, which I've just found out from GWT as the link now produces a 404.
Should I
a) ignore it?
b) ask them to replace it with a live link from my site (their site's highly relevant to mine)? or
c) ask them to remove it altogether as no-one wants footer links?

[dotfly]

I would recommend what youve mentioned under point b) ... I cant see why you should not take a little advantage from such a link?! As long as this site that gives you this link is not a "bad" one...

[Jeepster]

Footer link, though? Isn't that a no-no?

[GregB123]

Or you could just use your htaccess file to 301 redirect their broken link to whatever page on your site you want it to go to.

[Jeepster]

Now why didn't I think of that?
However, my question remains: You would take the link despite its being in a footer?

[KarlBantleman]

If you are referring to the anchor text links at the bottom I'd get it removed. They look extremely spammy and is probably doing you no good whatsoever.

Ask them to remove the link but if they refuse to or you don't get a response, use the disavow file.

[Jeepster]

Thanks for the input.
I agree they look spammy. I'm also going by this thread here:
http://moz.com/community/q/footer-link-2

Qu: the single footer link to my site produces a 404 Not Found (it was for a real estate listing that we deleted months ago).
Do I still need to take action or can I simply ignore?

[Jeepster]

Ah I think this answers my question:

....John Mueller of Google did confirm  at Google Webmaster Forum that, if a page is made 404 or 410, links to such a page are not counted by Google.