I'm developing a strategy to get my clients to link back to my hosting company's web site in order to help boost my search engine position (principally with Google). I could possibly get all of those clients to link to my home page. In the alternative, the client would probably prefer to link to other pages at my web site. Does anyone know how a search engine reacts to each?

As an example, how does Google react to (1) 1,000 inbound links to my home page as compared to (2) 1,000 inbound links to a variety of other pages at my web site?

If they are on similar servers to those of the site they are linking to then they will carry very little weight whether they link to the homepage or any other page on your site. If you suddenly get lots of links from the same group of IP addresses you could end up hurting your rankings rather than helping them - looks like a link farm.

However, deep links are considered to be good if you can ensure they tie up to the keywords and focus of the page in general - no point having people/bots landing on a page which isn't relevant to the link they came through on.

Also you would need to consider if the sites who would be linking to you have a good enough reputation to pass anything useful on anyway. Are they within a similar industry? Related industry links are much more effective than unrelated.

If you can manage to get the deep links, then they are better, I feel, as they help in indexing and in getting to the lower pages of a site.