I just read two WSOs that addressed this exact question. Both from article marketing veterans who also use SEO to rank highly for their keywords (meaning they're not throwing darts at the wall and praying for a good placement).

And...

They both had 100% opposite opinions, lol.

One said it absolutely helps and is extremely powerful for ranking (Kim Roach, love her stuff), and the other said any internal link has NO BENEFIT WHATSOEVER to Google.

I decided to just shoot for both and hope for the best haha.

What you are asking, it's a sticky wicket.

My answer is: Yes. But..

if you have no authority or link equity built up then it isn't that effective. However, once you do have PR, authority, "link juice" flowing to your site then you internal links can be VERY helpful.

Wordpress SEO: How to Maximize Your Internal Link Strategy - Good examples.
Essential Internal Linking Strategies | The Adventures of SEO Boy - Touches on internal links and human CTRs as well.
Internal Link Housekeeping - Search Engine Watch (SEW) - For those who already have a site and might need a little spring cleaning.

Well saying that internal links have no influence (on the destination URL page) is crazy-talk. We all know now that contextual links towards the top of the page are great. Plus, PR flow taken into account means that they do pass PR..

Thank you for your quick replies!

I was interested for this particular example - an ezine article with a few PR0 external links AND 8 PR6 links from other related ezine articles. If I have to compete with that I might as well just forget about it because it's a lontail with not many searches. But I can't believe these would count as much as 8 external PR6 links.
Thanks for the resources Brad! I'll make sure I read them but after I get some sleep after some heavy backlinking. Man it's a lot of work but I guess someone's gotta do it.

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