Internal linking for ecommerce: the Shopify version that actually moves rankings

Internal linking is the cheapest ranking work available to a Shopify store, and it is the work most stores never get round to. There is no outreach, no budget, nobody else to persuade. You already own every page involved. Yet on most stores I have opened, a good share of the blog articles have nothing at all pointing at them, and the collection pages that take the money are linked from the main navigation and from nowhere else.

This guide covers what to link, in which direction, with what anchor text, and how to run it as a repeatable sweep rather than a one-off tidy. The examples use a made-up garden tools store, because the principles are about page roles rather than product categories.

Why does internal linking matter more on a store than on a blog?

Because a store has two kinds of page with different jobs, and links are how one hands off to the other. A content site is mostly articles linking to articles. A store has articles that attract informational searches and collection pages that convert them, and if nothing connects the two, the article is a leaflet you handed to someone walking past your shop.

Say your garden tools store ranks well for “when to prune apple trees”. That query has real February volume and zero commercial intent on its face. The person reading it is about to need a pruning saw. If the article does not link into /collections/pruning-saws in the sentence where the reader is thinking about the tool, the traffic is decoration. It looks good in the analytics and it does nothing.

The second reason is that Google uses internal links to work out which of your pages is the important one for a topic. On a store, the candidates for a query include a product page, a collection page and an article. Your internal links are the clearest statement you can make about which one you want to rank. Most stores make no statement, and Google guesses. We wrote about what happens next in the guide to keyword cannibalisation on Shopify: when your own pages compete, the collection page is usually the one that loses, and the collection page is usually the one earning.

Which internal links actually count?

Editorial links inside body copy, pointing at a specific page, with an anchor that describes the destination. Almost everything else is boilerplate that Google has been discounting for the better part of two decades.

• Body-copy links from an article to a collection. The strongest link on a store, and the rarest. The article has earned relevance for an informational query; this passes some of it to the page that sells.
• Body-copy links from a collection description to an article. Almost nobody does this, which is a shame because collection pages usually have the most inbound authority on the whole site.
• Links between sibling articles in a cluster. Support posts link up to the pillar, the pillar links down to each support. This is what makes a group of posts a cluster rather than a folder.
• Navigation, footer and breadcrumb links. They keep crawl paths open, so they matter. They appear identically on every page, so they say nothing about which page is important.
• Related products and “you may also like” carousels. Template output. Fine for shoppers, close to worthless as a ranking signal.

Which direction should the links run?

Both, but the one that gets skipped is article to collection, and it is the one that pays. Most store owners instinctively add links pointing at their newest post, because that is the thing they just made. It is backwards for revenue and roughly neutral for rankings.

The routing that works, in order of what it is worth:

1. Article to collection, in body copy, at the moment the reader would want the product. Not a banner at the bottom.
2. The previously ranking page to the new article. If your /collections/pruning-saws page was showing at position 14 for “when to prune apple trees” before you wrote the guide, that collection page accumulated the relevance. Link from it to the new article and the relevance transfers to the page that deserves it.
3. Pillar to support and support to pillar, within a cluster.
4. Article to product, sparingly, where one specific product is genuinely the answer.

That second one is the move almost nobody makes, and it is the one with the most in it. Google already associated that collection page with the query. A link out of it, with a descriptive anchor, is the strongest way to say “this article is the better answer now”. It also protects you from the article and the collection splitting the query between them.

How do you find the links you are missing?

Three sources, none of which need a paid tool.

The first is Search Console. Pull your striking distance report, the queries sitting at position 5 to 20, and look at the ranking URL column rather than the query column. Every row where an informational query is being answered by a collection or product page is a missing link waiting to happen, and often a missing article too. The full walkthrough of that report covers the filters.

The second is a site: search. Search site:yourstore.com secateurs and you get every page you own that mentions the word. Those are your candidate linking pages for a secateurs article. Thirty seconds, and it beats guessing from memory.

The third is an orphan hunt: list every page with zero inbound editorial links. Shopify does not give you this, so manually it means exporting your sitemap, crawling it and filtering. It is tedious, which is why most stores do it once, find the list is long, fix half and never repeat.

What anchor text should you use?

Words that describe the destination, inside a sentence a person would have written anyway. “Our range of bypass secateurs” is a good anchor. “Click here” tells Google nothing. Repeating “best secateurs UK” as an exact-match anchor forty times tells Google you are optimising, which is a different signal from being relevant.

Three rules cover almost every case:

• Vary the wording. Natural writing produces natural variety, and the variety itself is the signal that these links were placed by a person for a reader.
• Put the link where the reader’s attention already is. A link to the pruning saw collection belongs in the paragraph about cutting branches over an inch thick, not in a footer block titled “shop our range”.
• Never link a phrase you would be embarrassed to read aloud. If the sentence only exists to hold the anchor, delete the sentence and find a real one.

The counter-example, same store: an article on sharpening secateurs that ends with a bolted-on “for all your garden tool needs, browse our extensive collection of garden tools today” is doing worse than no link. It reads as an advert, readers skip it, and the anchor is too generic to pass any topical signal.

How many internal links is too many?

There is no magic number, and anyone quoting one is repeating a rule of thumb from 2009 based on a crawl budget limit Google has since removed. The useful test is editorial: could you defend every link to a reader who asked why it was there? On a 2,000-word article that usually lands between five and twelve links, most to other articles, two or three to commercial pages.

The real failure is not link count, it is every link pointing the same way. A store where all the articles link to the homepage and the shop page has plenty of links and no routing.

What about broken internal links?

Fix them, and expect more than you think. Stores break their own links constantly and silently: a product sells out and gets archived, a collection is renamed for a seasonal campaign, an article URL is changed to tidy up a handle. Every one of those turns live links across your site into 404s, and nobody notices because the person who wrote the article is not the person who archived the product.

A broken internal link costs you twice. The authority it was passing goes nowhere, and a reader who was ready to buy hits an error page and leaves. On a store with any product churn, a quarterly broken-link sweep is revenue protection rather than optional maintenance. Separate the hard 404s from the soft failures and clear the hard ones first.

How do you turn this into a routine?

Two habits, one per publish and one per quarter.

On every publish, before you close the tab: add the link from the new article to the collection it should sell, add the link from the previously ranking page to the new article, and add the cluster links up and down. Twenty minutes, and it is the stage of our weekly Shopify blog SEO loop that people skip most often.

Every quarter, block out an hour: run the orphan list, run the broken link list, work both until they are empty. A first pass takes longer than an hour and finds more than you expect. Later passes are quick, because the per-publish habit stops most of the damage accumulating.

Where does software fit into this?

Honestly: the routine above works with a free crawler, Search Console and an hour a quarter, and it will keep working forever. Nothing in this post requires a tool. What a tool buys you is the part people stop doing, which is the repetition.

That is the job our Internal Linking feature does inside QueryClimb. It maps the graph, lists the broken links with hard 404s separated from soft failures, finds the articles nothing points at, then proposes the anchor and the place to put it for you to accept or reject. It does not rewrite your content behind your back, and it deliberately has nothing to do with backlinks. Paired with Search Insights it can see which page was ranking before you published, which is where the best link comes from, and Blog Writer wires the cluster links at draft time. The pricing page has the tiers, and the case study shows what the loop did to one store over six months.

The judgement stays yours either way. Whether a link belongs in a sentence, whether an orphan is worth rescuing or should be merged into something better, whether this quarter goes into linking or into the content calendar: a tool finds the candidates, you decide.

Frequently asked questions

How many internal links should a Shopify product page have?

Fewer than you would put in an article. A product page’s job is to convert, and every link is an exit. Two or three is plenty: one to the parent collection, one to the guide that explains how to choose, and one to a genuinely complementary product. Links back into the product page matter far more than links out of it.

Do internal links help with Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT?

Indirectly. Answer engines cite pages they can find and that answer a question cleanly, and an orphaned page gets crawled late and rarely. Internal links help discovery and signal which page is authoritative on a topic. They are not the main lever there. Direct answers and verifiable sourcing are, covered separately in the guide to getting a store cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews.

Should I use a Shopify auto-linking app?

Carefully, and only for patterns you genuinely want applied everywhere. Automatic keyword-to-URL rules place links where no editor would, and a rule set left running for six months quietly links half your site to one collection. Scope it tightly and audit what it did.

Is it worth linking to out-of-stock products?

Link to the collection instead. An out-of-stock product page is a dead end for the reader and often a thin page for Google. If the product is coming back, keep the page and link the collection alongside it. If it is gone for good, redirect it and fix the links that pointed at it.

How long before internal linking changes anything?

Faster than most SEO work, because you are moving relevance you already have rather than earning new relevance. Orphan rescues and links from previously ranking pages tend to show inside a few weeks. The compounding effect, where clusters lift each other, runs over quarters.