I don't know for sure, but I don't think any search engine would count internal links to improve a sites ranking. I could be wrong though.
Every link is counted. When you do a links:www.whatever.com it will return internal pages that have links to your homepage. How much does it count for? No one can answer that question accurately.
I believe that internal links can help you to rank a little better. Use static text links and have your keywords in the anchor text. I think full URLs may also help.
True. If the internal link also links back to its partent (and many such pages do), the home page gets a good rank. I have atleast one such website whose ranking is heaving based on internal links
Internal links also help tell search engines what the page is about. The link text povides a context for the page.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about this. Are you saying its worth making all links absolute instead of relative, as it does make a difference to ranking?
I think the search engine spiders figure out relative links otherwise they wouldn't be able to come back later to spider the links they found, However,,,, I use absolute just to be sure. And I disagree with Google not appreciating internal links. I've had sites get a PR of 2-4 Just based on internal links, at that time there was only a couple low PR links going to the sites. With a large number of pages on the site you can still get some PR even without external links.
When I switched them to relative I lost positions in MSN. Then I switched them back and gained back a bunch of the rankings. I think absolute links are worth more, atleast in MSN.
MSN's way of ranking pages in their search engine is unknown at the present time. MSN doesn't have the PageRank formula that Google uses, so I am going to guess that internal links and backlinks to your website doesn't necessarily increase your search rankings and keywords placements with MSN.
Through trial and error I am convinced that internal and inbound links will help a site to rank better in MSN.
Yep, and as far as the absolute urls go, I think you only gain positions if your url has your desired keywords in it. Otherwise I don't really see the point of using absolute urls...