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If a site over links to itself then they are most likely creating a bad user experience. When it comes to internal links, I would always but more priority on taxonomy and the user experience, the SEO would be a result of that.

Natural, diverse links from highly trusted sources is what comes to mind when I think about link building.

Well, I'm going to eventually be breaking down these pieces but I'm looking at much more than SEO for this exercise. I'm also looking at Design, Content, Performance, etc. I'm really just trying to get a high level view of who is doing what right.

I looked over my question after posting and I should have written it out differently. What I'm really wondering is, why does moz count internally linked pages as a "Link". Does it really matter how many internal links a website has or how many times a website links within it's self? It just seems like a useless metric.

I'm performing an analysis of some of our competitors and was wondering what is the best link metric to look it?

Page Specific Metrics - Total Links or Linking Root Domains?

Root Domain Metrics - Total Links or Linking Root Domains?

Total links seems like it would be less important since it includes internal links from page to page within the site.