Say your blog has a guide called "How to choose trail running shoes." It ranks well and has brought in readers for a year. It explains grip, drop, waterproofing and fit at length, then it ends. Not one sentence links to your trail shoe collection, which sits two clicks away in the menu and gets no authority from the guide. Internal links are how the pages that attract attention hand it to the pages that earn money. The hand-off only happens when you do it on purpose.
What a link does for the page it points to
An internal link does three jobs for its target. It helps Google find the page, because Googlebot discovers pages by following links, as the first lesson in the SEO track explains. It tells Google the page matters: Google's link best practices describe links as a signal it uses for relevance and for finding pages to crawl. And the anchor text, the words inside the link, tells Google what the destination is about. The same guidance asks for anchor text that describes the page it leads to.
Guides and blog posts are where most of a store's outside attention lands. Other sites link to a helpful guide far more readily than to a product grid, and informational searches bring readers all year. That attention travels onward only along the links the guide contains.
Collections and products usually have the reverse problem. Everything links to them from the menu and nothing links to them from the text. Closing that gap is a decision about where attention goes, so it has to be deliberate.
Choose the pages that deserve it
Start from revenue. List the collections that sell, then the products that earn searches of their own, such as a hero product or a brand people look up by name. Keep the list short, because spreading links evenly across everything cancels the effect.
For each page on the list:
- Find the posts and guides on your site that already discuss what it sells. A Google search for
site:yourstore.complus the product type surfaces them quickly, and so does your blog's own search. - Read each candidate and mark the sentence where the product or collection is actually discussed. The link goes there.
- Note the gaps. A money page with no post that mentions it needs one, and the buying guides lesson covers writing it.
Most posts end up linking to one or two money pages. Avoid the post that links to ten collections because it could.
Write the link so it carries meaning
Placement comes first. Put the link in the body, in the sentence where a reader has just learned why they'd want the thing. A sidebar widget, a footer block or a "shop now" banner can't do that job alone. A reader who has just read why a rock plate matters is ready to see "our trail shoes with rock plates."
Anchor text is next. Use the phrase a buyer would search for and the collection answers, so the link reads "waterproof trail running shoes" rather than "click here" or "this collection." Keep each phrase pointing at one page, since the same anchor text sent to three different collections muddies all three. One link per target per post is enough.
Then the URL. Link to the canonical address of the page, the one its own canonical tag names. On Shopify, a product opened from a collection has a URL like /collections/trail-shoes/products/ridge-runner, while the page's canonical tag points to /products/ridge-runner. Link to the second so your link reaches the page Google indexes. The duplicate URLs lesson explains the rest of that platform habit.
Finally, make it an ordinary link. Google's link best practices are explicit that it follows <a> tags with an href. A button that navigates through JavaScript, or a click handler on a span, may never be followed. Leave nofollow off internal links. Google changed it to a hint rather than an instruction in 2019, and there's no reason to hint Google away from your own pages.
Keep the links alive
Internal linking decays. New products launch with no links from anything but their collection. Posts get published and nobody checks which money page they should feed.
A short routine prevents most of it:
- When a product launches, link to it the same week from the post that already ranks for its product type.
- Before a post goes out, check that it links to the collection it discusses.
- Every few months, re-run the site search. Look for mentions that still carry no link.
- Link the other way too. A product page that links to the guide answering a buyer's doubt keeps a hesitant visitor on your site, and the content-to-cart lesson goes deeper on this pairing.
Site-wide "related products" widgets are fine to keep. They're identical on every page, though, so the links that carry meaning are the ones you place in the text.
Frequently asked questions
How to do internal linking in HTML?
Use a standard anchor tag with an href pointing at the page's canonical URL, and put the descriptive phrase between the tags. Google follows <a> tags with an href, but a JavaScript button or a click handler on a span may never be followed. Leave nofollow off.
What is the best linking strategy for SEO?
Concentrate links on a short list of pages that earn money, and place each one in the sentence where the reader has just been given a reason to want it. Use the phrase a buyer would search for as the anchor text, and point each phrase at one page. Spreading links evenly across everything cancels the effect.
What are the three types of links?
The ones that matter here are links on your own site, which are internal, and links from other sites to yours, which bring outside attention to your guides. Internal links are the only way that attention then reaches your collections and products. Within internal links, a body link with descriptive anchor text does far more than a menu or footer link.
What to take away
- Guides and posts collect attention from searches and other sites. Internal links are the only way that attention reaches the pages that sell.
- Concentrate links on a short list of money pages, placed in the sentence where the reader has just been given a reason to buy.
- Use the buyer's phrase as anchor text, link to the canonical URL, and use an ordinary
<a href>link withoutnofollow. - Add links when products launch and posts publish, and review every few months so the map keeps up with the catalogue.
Next
Filters are the opposite problem, pages you never meant to create; learn to control them in Faceted navigation and filters.