Internal linking strategy for ecommerce sites

How should you do internal linking on an ecommerce site?

Ecommerce internal linking means building a clear link hierarchy from the home page and menu to categories, from categories to sub-categories, and from there to every product. On top of that you add breadcrumbs, related product blocks and contextual links from blog posts to categories. The goal is to help Google find every product and to send stronger importance signals to your best sellers.

Internal links are one of the few SEO levers fully under your control. Earning external links can take months; you can fix your internal link structure in a single sprint. A good structure also works as a map for shoppers, not just for search engines.

How does Google use internal links?

Google's SEO starter guide says Google primarily finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled. Its documentation on ecommerce site structure adds that the more internal links point to a page, the more important that page can appear relative to others on the site.

Two practical consequences follow:

• Discovery: if category pages do not link directly to every product in the category, Google's documentation warns that Googlebot might not find all products by crawling alone. In that case a sitemap or a Merchant Center feed should be used as an extra discovery path.
• Importance: linking best sellers from the home page, blog posts or newsletters is a visibility method Google itself recommends.

Which technical rules matter?

Google states plainly that it can only crawl links that are a HTML elements with an href attribute. Buttons that navigate with JavaScript, redirects triggered by onclick events and links whose href starts with javascript are not links to Google.

In ecommerce themes the problem shows up most often in these places:

1. Mega menus: if menu items only load through JavaScript on hover, the links may be missing from the page source.
2. Load more buttons: products loaded by infinite scroll or a button may not be crawlable unless they also exist on paginated URLs.
3. Filters and sorting: decide deliberately which filters you want indexed; we cover this in our technical SEO guide.
4. Product cards: if the whole card is clickable but contains no real a element, the product page link is not crawled.

The check is simple: open the page, view the source or the rendered HTML in Search Console's URL Inspection tool, and confirm that critical links exist as a href elements.

How should you choose anchor text?

According to Google, good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant both to the page it sits on and to the page it links to. Phrases like "click here" or "read more" give no context. Forcing keywords into anchor text is not recommended either; in Google's words, if it feels forced, it is probably too much.

Context	Weak anchor	Strong anchor
Blog to category	"click here"	"our linen shirt range"
Product copy to care guide	"details"	"linen fabric care guide"
Category copy to sub-category	"see all"	"short-sleeve linen shirts"
Image link	Empty alt text	Alt text that describes the product

For image links, Google uses the alt attribute of the img element as anchor text. If category tiles or banners link somewhere, do not leave their alt text empty.

Which internal link types does an online store need?

A good structure has several layers:

Link type	Where	Job
Main menu	Every page	Access to main categories
Category and sub-category listings	Category pages	Product discovery
Breadcrumbs	Category and product pages	Show hierarchy, return to parent level
Related and complementary products	Product pages	Sideways navigation and cross-selling
Contextual text links	Blog posts, category copy	Explain topical relationships
Home page features	Home page	Importance signal for priority pages

You can also mark up breadcrumbs with structured data. Google's BreadcrumbList documentation explains that this markup can be used to show a page's position in the site hierarchy in search results.

Example: an internal link map for one category page

Example: take the "women's leggings" category page of a sportswear brand. It is linked from the main menu, connects to the "women's clothing" parent through breadcrumbs and offers shortcuts to the "high-waisted", "full-length" and "shorts" sub-categories. The category copy contains one contextual link to a leggings size guide. Every product card leads to its product page through a real a element, and pagination reaches page two and three through crawlable URLs. On product pages, a "pairs well with" block links to sports bras and breadcrumbs lead back to the category. In this structure no product sits more than a few clicks from the home page, and Google can discover every layer in a single crawl path.

How do you connect blog posts to sales?

On most online stores, blog traffic is disconnected from revenue. The fix is to link every post contextually to the relevant category and a few featured products. Example: a post on how to iron a linen shirt can link to the linen shirt category and to non-iron models.

The reverse direction matters as well. One or two links from category copy to relevant guides help shoppers who are still deciding and strengthen topical coherence. We explain how to structure category copy in our category page SEO guide.

How do you find orphan pages?

An orphan page is a page that receives no internal links at all. Google's advice is clear: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. In ecommerce, orphans usually come from products whose category was deleted, old campaign pages and URLs that live only in the sitemap.

To find them:

1. Crawl your site with a crawler starting from the home page and export the URL list it finds.
2. Export the URL list from your XML sitemap separately.
3. URLs in the sitemap that the crawl did not reach are your orphan candidates.
4. In the Search Console Links report, check whether your most internally linked pages are really your most important pages.
5. Decide for each orphan: if it has value, link to it from a relevant category or article; if not, remove or redirect it.

How often should you review internal links?

Internal link structures decay as you add products, restructure categories and open or close seasonal campaigns. A quarterly crawl plus a look at the Links report is enough for most stores. After a major theme or platform change, crawl immediately.

Key takeaways

• Build a clear hierarchy from menu to categories, sub-categories and every product.
• Confirm that critical links are real a elements with an href.
• Keep anchor text descriptive without stuffing keywords, and fill in alt text on image links.
• Link best sellers and priority categories from the home page and from blog posts.
• Find orphan pages regularly by comparing your sitemap with crawl results.

If you want to see where your store's internal link structure is leaking value, Performetic can run a free crawl and share a growth analysis with you.