Question about PR and internal linking

[JonR28]

My biggest competitor had 1,200 backlinks in google from his own website. Basically each content page had a graphic with some descriptive ALT text linking back to his index. My question is do these 1,200 backlinks affect his PR? Since they are all in the same Domian you would think that it would just distribute the PR around his domain and not actually increase it. Am I right?

[Marcia]

Page Rank is conferred by linking to pages. Whether many links or few links from a given site or within a site are counted could be a variable, but links do *give* PR. It couldn't work with just sharing it. Bigger sites would just have a tiny fraction of total value for each page, while a 2-pager would split 50/50. It doesn't work that way.

[doc_z]

My question is do these 1,200 backlinks affect his PR?

yes

Since they are all in the same Domian you would think that it would just distribute the PR around his domain and not actually increase it.

As long as the number of pages of the site is unchanged (and the PR transferred to external pages is unchanged and you doesn't have dead ends) and just the link structure of the site is changed by adding/removing internal links, the PR of the site (sum of PR over all pages) in unchanged. You are just changing the distribution. However, the PR of a page (e.g. the index page) is changed. For example, you can decrease the PR of content pages and increase the PR of the main (index) page.