Footer links on my site... bad for passing page rank?

[Ron10]

i've been told that it is possible that google discounts the weight or page rank passed in footer links of websites and my website has the navigation to many  of my  pages in the footer of each page.  My whole website is about 20 pages so each page has links to the 5 most popular pages at the top and the rest of the links are in the footer of each page.  Am i losing page rank by having these links in the footer?  Should i make my navigation different?

I have lots of articles on my site so i thought it might be not only helpful to my readers but give my pages an seo  boost if i placed in context links in the body of my articles to other pages of my site. Does this sound like a good idea?

Thanks mozzers!

Thanks mozzers!

[MattAntonino]

It is very likely that Google does discount the weight of links passing value in the footer (or sidebar).

I would say if you're only linking internal links in the footer just do so naturally and without overoptimised anchor text you should be fine. Where people get in trouble is if they're really trying to do "PR sculpting" (see: http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/)

Do what works best for your users and your site. That should be priority #1 anyways and you will be ok from there.