Internal Linking

Internal linking means placing links on your own pages that point to other pages you own: a blog post linking to a collection, a product page linking to a size guide, a collection page linking to a related collection. The links help shoppers move around and help search engines find pages and understand which ones matter most.

It is not link building, which means earning links from other people's websites. It is also not a Canonical URL, which tells search engines that two near-identical pages are really the same page. A canonical resolves duplication; an internal link passes attention and relevance from a page you already have to a page you want found.

Two things get counted. First, inbound internal links: how many pages on your store link to a given page. Shopify does not report this, so a site crawler gives you the number. Second, whether the links get used. Divide clicks on a link by sessions that actually reached the section of the page holding it. That is the honest denominator. Dividing by all sessions on the page is the flattering one, because it counts people who scrolled nowhere near the link.

A Topic Cluster is the structure internal links create when supporting articles all point at one main page. Programmatic SEO generates many pages at once, which then need internal links or they sit unfound. Schema Markup describes a page to search engines in code rather than connecting pages. A Canonical URL resolves duplicate pages instead of linking separate ones.