Ecommerce SEO
Internal linking rules that pass authority to money pages
Which links carry authority inside a store, where money pages sit in the click graph, and the rules we apply to navigation, collections, products and guides.
By CartKernel · Published
Links from other sites are hard to earn. Links inside your own site are free, and most stores spend them badly. The pages that should rank for commercial terms, which for a store means collections and the products under them, ought to receive the most internal links, with the most descriptive anchors, from the pages that carry the most authority. Below are the rules we apply, the order we apply them in, and the afternoon-long audit that shows where a store is leaking.
Rule 1: every money page within three clicks of the home page
Click depth is the first thing to measure. A crawler run from the home page reports how many clicks each URL needs; collections should be one or two, products two or three. Products at depth six exist on most large stores, reached only through page nine of a collection, and they are crawled less and rank worse for it. The fixes are structural: more sub-collections, links from parents to children, and pagination that does not require walking every page to reach the last.
Rule 2: navigation links go to the pages that should rank
The header menu is the most repeated set of links on the site, present on every page, and it should point at the collections you want to rank rather than at everything you have. A mega-menu with three hundred entries gives each one a sliver. Put the top collections and the sub-collections that target real queries in the menu, and leave the rest to be reached from their parents. The footer carries policy pages and a handful of hubs; it is not a place for a column of keyword links.
Rule 3: parents link to children, children link up and sideways
A collection links to its sub-collections near the top of the page with the child’s name as anchor. A sub-collection links back to its parent through the breadcrumb and to its siblings through a short row of related collections. A product links to its canonical collection through the breadcrumb and to complementary products in a row below the fold. This is the lattice that lets authority flow down to specific pages and back up to the head-term pages, and sub-category pages tend to rank or not on the strength of it.
Rule 4: guides link down, with the term as the anchor
Buying guides and blog posts exist, for SEO purposes, to send links to collections and products. Each guide should link to the collection it is about with the collection’s search term as the anchor, and to the products it recommends by name. “Click here” and “shop now” pass nothing about the destination. Whether a store needs a blog comes down to whether it will be used this way, and programmatic buying guides are worth building mainly because they can be built to link correctly from the start.
Rule 5: one URL per page, everywhere a link appears
Every internal link points to the canonical URL, and only that URL. Not the collection-nested product path, not a version with a trailing slash, not a tracking parameter, not http. A canonical tag tells Google which version you prefer; a thousand internal links to the other version tell it something different, and internal links are the louder signal. Duplicate product URLs on Shopify are almost always an internal-linking problem dressed up as a canonical problem.
Rule 6: links are real links
A link is an anchor element with an href that resolves to a URL. Buttons with click handlers, JavaScript routers that change the view without a crawlable URL, and menus that only render on interaction are not links to a crawler. Google’s guidance on crawlable links is short and worth reading with your theme open. Where you do not want a link followed, the better answer is usually not to render a crawlable link at all rather than to add nofollow, which Google treats as a hint.
Rule 7: orphans are adopted or retired
An orphan is a URL in the sitemap with no internal links pointing to it. Products that were removed from every collection but never unpublished, landing pages from old campaigns, and collections nobody linked to after a redesign. They sit in the discovered but not indexed report and the product pages not indexed list. Add each one to the collection it belongs in, or remove it and its sitemap entry.
Rule 8: pagination and facets must not absorb the link budget
A collection with fifty pages and twelve filters can generate more internal links to paginated and filtered URLs than to products. Paginated pages link forward and back and carry a self-referencing canonical; filtered URLs are canonicalized to the base collection, and filter combinations that have not earned a page are not linked with crawlable anchors. This is a crawl budget question as much as a linking one, and letting it run is how index bloat starts.
Rule 9: anchor text describes the destination
The anchor should say what the destination page is about, ideally including its primary term. Vary the wording as naturally as writing allows, but do not use the same anchor for two different URLs or two different anchors that both claim the head term for pages that compete. Image links need alt text that does the same job.
Rule 10: contextual links in copy
Links inside product descriptions and collection copy are the ones most stores never add and the ones that read most naturally to a crawler. A product description links to compatible accessories, the collection it belongs to and the guide that explains how to choose. Collection copy links to sub-collections and to the guide for the category. These are written by the person writing the copy, at the time of writing, and they compound.
The afternoon audit
- Crawl the site and export, for every URL, its click depth, count of inlinks and the anchors used.
- Join that export with landing-page revenue from GA4 and impressions from Search Console.
- Sort by revenue potential, then read the inlinks column. Pages with strong demand and few inlinks are the list.
- For the top twenty, decide which of the ten rules is being broken and fix it at the template level where possible, so the fix applies to every page of that type.
- Re-crawl in a month and compare depth and inlink counts.
| Template | Where its inlinks should come from |
|---|---|
| Top collection | Header menu, home page, breadcrumb of every child and product, guides |
| Sub-collection | Parent collection tiles, sibling row, breadcrumb of its products, guides |
| Product | Collection grid, complementary rows on other products, guides, breadcrumb of nothing below it |
| Buying guide | Collection copy, product descriptions, blog index, footer hub |
| Policy page | Footer, checkout, product page trust row |
Platform notes
On Shopify, menus are built under Navigation, product URLs should be linked as /products/handle rather than the collection-nested form, and the theme’s breadcrumb and related-product sections are where most of the lattice lives. On WooCommerce, the category widgets and the breadcrumb from the SEO plugin do the same job, and permalink settings decide whether category paths appear in product URLs. On BigCommerce, the category tree and the breadcrumb are the primary structure and the theme decides how deep the menu renders.
None of this replaces links from elsewhere; whether backlinks matter for a store has its own answer. It decides where the authority you already have ends up, which is the part you control. The category page SEO work we do starts with this audit, because a collection page cannot rank on content alone if nothing on the site points at it.