WPMU VS THIS site(s)

So, tell me again why WPMU was penalized? (rhetorical question). Massive site-wide footer links from low quality sites, if I recall correctly, right?

Now, look at these sites,

lawyers.com.au
wedding.com.au
electricians.com.au
fitness.com.au

They are all owned (or probably developed) by the same company who owns major news publication agencies in Ausie.

They even use similar themes on these sites.

If you look at their backlinks profiles, take lawyers.com.au for example, you would see that the majority of their backlinks are coming from footer links from these news agencies and niche related homepage backlinks.

So basically, EVERY SINGLE time these news sites publish new posts, they get new backlinks, using the same anchor text (talk about over-optimization).

Ahrefs shows more than 500,000 of these backlinks are using the same anchor text and same backlinks type (footer links)

As for the homepage backlinks (blog networks), I looked at a few of those, and they are very niche targeted, but still, you could spot that they are not "real" blogs.

I personally would love to get my hands on those blog networks.

lawyers.com.au for instance, is ranking for a ton of highly competitive keywords such as, lawyers, lawyer, solicitors, etc.

Also, these sites (lawyers, fitness, wedding, etc) are all connected through footer links. I've seen numerous people on Google webmaster forum getting penalized because of these, but these sites seem to be "Google proof"...

So, why did WPMU get hit and these sites didn't? Quality of footer links???

I would love to hear your opinions..