I'm just wondering if you say had an Ezine article already listed in Google with reasonable results for searches. Would giving that article backlinks boost where it appears in G giving it higher places in the same way a website would?
Yes... you can add any backlinks to your articles of EA in order to improve the SERP. For Google, this way is no problem. But EzineArticles doesn't allow this way. If you do it, EA will terminate your account. I have bad experience with the way.