I heard that 2 websites linking to each other will have their links values cancelled by Google. That is why people use 3-way link exchange to get value for their link exchange. I have many websites exchanging links together and pages exchanging inside the same website and I am wondering how my SEO is going with this structure. Here are my questions 1) I have a static navigation bar at the bottom of a website. The navigation is present on each page. That means that each page links to each other. What is the effect of that? Does it help? Could I have any SEO problem on that particular website? 2) If some links between 2 different websites (links from pages and navigation bar) create a linking loop between 2 pages, could these 2 pages have any SEO problem? Otherwise, is it better to not have these links than having them (for SEO)? Wikipedia exchanges a lot of links between pages (even between 2 pages creating a loop) and that does not seem to create any problem. So, I suppose that would not hurt anyone.
>I have a static navigation bar at the bottom of a website. The navigation is >present on each page. That means that each page links to each other. What >is the effect of that? Does it help? Could I have any SEO problem on that >particular website? you won't have problems with that, it will just make crawling easier for the robots. As for the linking loop - this should not be dangerous, there are examples of such strategy applied successfully.
Google doesn't 100% punish reciprocal links, or at least I've seen no evidence if this. However it does try to figure out link exchange programs, as these links are unnatural, and Google doesn't like unnatural linking. Links on the bottom of your site are fine. Google is a fan of good internal linking structure. If it helps a human use your site, Google will be a fan. Linking loops aren't necessarily a bad thing for the reason noted above, in some instances it's good for pages and sites to link back and forth. As I said above, if it's good for a human, it's good for Google. Try not to overthink you link strategy here. Make it sensible and human friendly and you'll be fine. Good luck!
I own a handful of websites. Two of those sites are free stuff sites and for a while I was all about getting link trades with other sites. I have reciprocal links on the homepage sidebar and also on a friends page on those two sites. One of those sites is a page rank 5 and the other is a 4. I don't think it hurt me. I don't do it anymore though. A lot of webmaster don't honor link trades. As far as traffic from link trading...some sites are good most are not. Then again, I've never traded any links at all for my other sites and they are all page rank 4. I hear that internal linking is very important.