Let's see two more myths ...

3. External links matter much more than internal ones

Wrong!

Internal and external links each carry their OWN importance!

Yes, I agree, the inbound links are one of the most important ranking factors.

Still, the internal links are also important in different ways.

First of all: they will help you to keep your readers on your site. And that means longer session duration ... which is good for SEO.

Second: by linking from higher to lower ranking pages, you'll give a so-called link juice boost to your malnourished pages.

Third: by interlinking your content, you can create so-called topic clusters and nowadays in the age of semantic search, they could be very helpful. Why? Because, when Google comes to your site and finds a whole topic cluster instead of one page, you'll have great chances to be considered an expert of the given topic. And that means higher rankings ...

4. All links on the page are of equal ranking value

Honestly? I think that is just absurd ...

Do you really think that in-body links and footer links will carry the same value?

Than answer this: which link has more chances to be clicked at?

Long story short: the influence of the link's page position was clearly confirmed by Google.

According to Google, the following factors can/will influence the value of your links:

4.1 the position of the link on the page

4.2 font size of the link's anchor text

4.3 the font color and the font attributes (italics, bold, etc)

4.4 the text context surrounding the given link

4.5 the type of the given link (text link, image link)

So yes, the higher a link is positioned on the page, the more it weighs, and the more value it passes to the pages it links to.

This is why in case of multiple links to the same URL, only the first link will matter in terms of passing ranking value.