Internal Linking

Why internal linking matters

Internal links do three different jobs at the same time:

For crawlers — links are the roads a bot uses to walk the site. A page with no inbound internal
link is a dead end: the crawler never reaches it through navigation. New pages are discovered
through links first and through the sitemap second.

For distributing authority — PageRank, or link equity, flows along internal links. The homepage
and high-authority sections irrigate target pages with that authority.

For the search engine — anchor text and link structure signal how pages relate thematically. If
five blog articles link to one category page with the anchor women’s running shoes, the engine
reads that page as the authoritative one on the subject.

Linking structures in e-commerce

In an online store internal links cluster in a handful of places:

Faceted linking: the main e-commerce trap

Faceted navigation — the filters — generates URL combinations such as
/shoes?color=blue&size=42&brand=nike. Indexing every combination creates three problems:

1. Crawl budget waste — the bot spends its visits on thousands of low-value pages instead of
   the priority ones
2. Duplicate content — /shoes?color=blue and /shoes?brand=nike&color=blue partially overlap
3. Cannibalization — several URLs compete for one and the same query

The standard fix: a canonical to the master URL plus nofollow, or a Disallow for parameter URLs
in robots.txt.

A linking strategy for the blog

Content pages — articles and guides — pass authority to commercial pages efficiently through
topical links:

Article "How to choose running shoes"
→ link to /catalog/running-shoes (category)
→ link to /product/nike-react-infinity (product)
→ link to /blog/how-to-choose-size (related article)

Tip: when you publish a new article, add two or three internal links to it from pages already
published. That speeds up indexation and starts the accumulation of PageRank straight away.

Common linking mistakes

• “Read more” as the anchor: the engine cannot tell what the page is pointing at
• Links inside JavaScript events with no href: crawlers follow ordinary <a href=""> tags,
  not onclick handlers
• Infinite pagination without rel="canonical" or a correct rel="next/prev" adds junk pages
  to the index
• Links to noindex pages: they pass PageRank to pages that cannot rank — authority spent for
  nothing
• Hundreds of links on one page: the weight is split across all of them, and the return on each
  link falls