When having an outbound link in the PHP footer on WordPress or similar, that appears on every page instance. Does that link appear to Google on every page? With 300 pages would that be 300 outbound links?

A friend of mine has just had a website created by a company who have their domain for web design dofollow linked at the bottom. He is trying to consider SEO for his website and I wonder if this would have any strain on a small site with only a couple of backlinks.