Internal linking is the practice of linking between pages on the same website. Internal links help visitors navigate from one page to the next, pass authority between pages and show search engines how the site is structured and which pages matter most. Every menu item, breadcrumb, “related products” block and link inside a blog article is part of your internal link structure, whether you planned it or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most shop owners think of links as something you get from other websites. A backlink<\/a> is valuable, but internal links are the ones you fully control, and they are usually the most neglected part of a shop. I regularly audit webshops where the pages that bring in revenue sit five or six clicks from the homepage, while the privacy policy is linked from every page in the footer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Search engines discover pages by following links. A page that no other page links to, an orphan page, might be listed in your XML-sitemap<\/a>, but Google treats it as unimportant because your own site says so. Pages that receive many internal links, especially from pages with authority of their own, get crawled more often and rank more easily. This flow of authority, usually called link equity or PageRank flow, is the mechanism behind it. Anchor text adds a relevance signal: a link with the text “elektrische fiets” tells Google what the target page is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a webshop this translates directly into money. If your category page for electric bikes gets one link from a mega menu and nothing else, it carries the same weight as the category for bike bells. Crawl budget plays a role too: a large PrestaShop or Magento shop with faceted navigation can generate tens of thousands of thin internal links to filter combinations, which keeps Googlebot busy on pages that will never convert while new products wait to be indexed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Screaming Frog is my starting point. A crawl gives me the number of inlinks per URL, the crawl depth (how many clicks a page is from the homepage) and an export of all anchor text used. With the Google Search Console and sitemap integration switched on, it also lists orphan URLs: pages that exist in your sitemap or receive impressions but that the crawler cannot reach by following links. My rule of thumb is that every page that should rank sits within three clicks of the homepage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Links report in Google Search Console shows which pages receive the most internal links: if your returns page sits above your best category there, something is off. Ahrefs Site Audit has an internal links report that flags orphan pages, internal links pointing at redirects and pages with few inlinks. For a quick check of broken internal links on a single page I use my own free broken link checker<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mega menus that link everything equally.<\/strong> When the main navigation links to 400 categories from every page, every category gets the same signal and nothing stands out. Navigation and footer links are fine, but they are not a substitute for contextual links placed in the content of relevant pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nofollow on internal links.<\/strong> Some shops add rel=”nofollow” to cart, account or filter links in the hope of steering authority. It does not work that way: the equity that would have flowed through those links is simply lost. Nofollow on internal links is a waste; if a page should not be crawled, block it in robots.txt or do not link to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faceted navigation and pagination left unmanaged.<\/strong> Filter links for colour, size and price create thousands of near-identical URLs, and deep pagination pushes products far from the homepage. Without canonical tags, crawl rules or a deliberate choice about which filter pages deserve to be indexed, your most valuable internal links get diluted across junk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Broken links and redirect chains after a migration.<\/strong> After a platform switch, say from Lightspeed to Shopify, the old URLs often stay in menus, blog articles and product descriptions. Each one now points at a redirect or a 404, which leaks authority and slows the crawl. Cleaning this up is a fixed step in every SEO-migratie<\/a> I run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I start with a full crawl and match it against the pages that actually earn money: the categories and products with revenue in GA4 and impressions in Search Console. The comparison shows the gaps, such as a top-selling category at click depth five, blog articles that only link to each other, or subcategories with two inlinks. I fix the structure first (category hierarchy, breadcrumbs, product-to-category links and related products), because that repairs hundreds of pages at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy internal linking matters for a webshop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How to check your internal link structure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Common internal linking mistakes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How I handle internal linking for clients<\/h2>\n\n\n\n