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I wonder why Google's PhD engineers didn't post detailed info about this?....  But, I can probably understand it better from the Moz blog. They also should have warned people that it would tank their adsense earnings.

These links in the footer pass little to no SEO value anymore. I would stop doing this and encourage your client to spread the news about their new website to local media and have them write an article/press release which refers to you as the designer with a link. If the website contains a blog they could also place a blog post about the new site and give you credit themselves.

This is a great question. Recently Google started hiding the traffic details from everyone, which is why you see "not provided" in the details. Everyone was affected by this, and we are trying to work with them to get this data type back. Rand talks about this in detail here: http://moz.com/blog/100-percent-keyword-not-provided-whiteboard-tuesday and Ruth touches on this as well  here: http://moz.com/blog/what-is-seo-now. I hope this helps shed some light on what you are seeing here. I know this is odd and not extremely valuable information now, but we are always working on improving this process and are very open to suggestions and feedback just like this.