Ive done a lot of internal linking before but its always been for other inner pages but now I need to do it for a websites homepage but this got me thinking if its even worth doing and should I be doing it at all? For the first question I was thinking that surely the homepage has more authority than any of my inner pages so how would internal links from inner pages help and for the second question Ive read a few posts like this Kissmetrics one here where it says you shouldnt do it.

There are two types of links you should avoid using in your content:

Homepage. Most sites have too many links to the homepage as it is. You would rather strengthen internal pages to boost the overall SEO of your site, rather than simply point more links at the homepage.

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/commandments-of-internal-linking/

thoughts?

So my understanding is that you can use site: [page url without http] to check if a page is indexed by Google, is this 100% reliable though?

Just recently Ive worked on a few pages that have not shown up when Ive checked them using site: but they do show up when using info: and also show their cached versions, also the rest of the site and pages above it (the url I was checking was quite deep) are indexed just fine.

What does this mean?

thank you

p.s I do not have WMT or GA access for these sites