Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages within the same domain through hyperlinks to distribute authority, establish topical relationships, and guide both users and search crawlers through a site's content hierarchy.
Internal Linking in plain English
Internal linking connects pages on the same website using clickable anchor text. On an ecommerce store, a blog post about 'how to choose running shoes' linking to the running shoes category page, which in turn links to specific product pages, is internal linking in action. Every link tells search engines that the destination page is relevant to the source page's topic.
Mechanically, internal links pass two signals: authority (often called link equity) and relevance. When a high-authority page on a site links to another page, a portion of that authority transfers through the link. The anchor text — the visible, clickable words — tells search engines what the destination page is about. Crawlers follow these links to discover new pages, understand site structure, and assess which pages are most important based on how many internal links point to them and from where.
Done well, internal linking forms a clear hierarchy: high-traffic pages link down to related products, categories cross-link to complementary categories, and supporting content (guides, FAQs, blog posts) links into commercial pages with descriptive anchor text. Done poorly, it looks like orphan pages with zero internal links, generic 'click here' anchors, navigation-only linking with no contextual links inside body content, or every page linking to every other page without intent.
A common ecommerce benchmark: every indexable page should have at least 3 internal links pointing to it, and key revenue pages (top categories, hero products) should sit no more than 3 clicks from the homepage. Pages buried 5+ clicks deep get crawled less frequently and rank worse, regardless of their content quality.
Why internal linking matters for ecommerce
For ecommerce stores, internal linking directly shapes which products and categories rank — and therefore which ones generate revenue. Stores with thousands of SKUs face a crawl budget problem: Google won't index every page, so internal links signal which pages deserve priority. A store that links its blog content and supporting pages into money-making category pages concentrates authority where it converts. A store that ignores internal linking ends up with orphaned product pages, deep-buried collections that never rank, and blog traffic that never feeds the commercial funnel. The difference between a well-linked catalog and a poorly-linked one shows up as missed organic revenue on pages that already exist.