Links using keywords on bottom of page technique

Is it really helping? Link relevance problem

[silverbytes]

I see a common practice is to put a paragraph on bottom of page mostly with 10 to 30 links using all keywords related, leading to specific pages.

So if you sell widgets, you can find there a sort of "nav bar" like this:

blue widgets ¦ used widgets ¦ buy widgets online ¦ learn to make your widgets

and so on.

I think the purpouse is to support very specific pages that leads some interesting traffic.

So my 2 questions are:

1- Does this practice help? Do you see it's working?

2- Doesn't that weaken the strenght of your links leading to main sections of your site? (Since all sites have main sections, a page with only 10 links would give more relevancy to linked pages than other having 40)

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I can't speak for anyone else but I think it has been effective for me.