Ecommerce Link Building: 5 Steps to Links That Reach Product Pages
Product pages almost never earn links on their own. The five steps that work around that, and what a hand count of seven ranking guides leaves out about gifted products and Google's spam policy.
Ecommerce link building is earning links from other websites to an online store, usually to its homepage, guides and research, then using internal links to carry that authority to the category and product pages that sell. Very few sites link to a product page unprompted. The links a store earns land on things worth citing, and the store's own navigation does the rest.
The short answers, before anything else:
- What is ecommerce link building? Getting other sites to link to your store, then routing that value to the pages you want to rank. Full answer below.
- How do I get backlinks to product pages? Mostly indirectly. Earn links to a guide, a tool or your own data, and link from there to the category and product pages. The five steps.
- Can I send free products to bloggers for links? You can send products. Google lists "sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link" as link spam unless the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". What Google says.
- Which pages should I build links to? Whatever is linkable: guides, data, tools, the brand story. Then pass it on with internal links. Where the links land.
- How do I pass authority from a blog post to a category page? Link to the category from the post, in the body, with the category's name as the anchor. Google's own guidance.
That covers the search. The method comes next, then the evidence.
What is ecommerce link building?#
Link building for a store has the same goal as any link building: get other sites to choose to link to you, because those choices are one of the ways Google judges which pages deserve to rank. What makes ecommerce different is the gap between the pages that earn links and the pages that make money.
A product page is a price, a photo, a size chart and a buy button. A writer rarely needs to cite one. A category page is a filtered list of products, which is even less citable. Yet those two page types carry nearly all of a store's commercial searches.
Four of the seven ranking guides I read for this post say the same thing in their own words. LinkForce puts it most plainly: "Commercial pages rarely earn organic links." LinkScope adds the fix in one line: "External links land on the linkable asset. Internal links carry the value forward to where it matters most."
So ecommerce link building is two jobs. The first is earning links to pages people want to cite. The second is the internal linking that hands that value to the pages that sell.
How to build links to an online store in five steps#
This is the order I would run it in for a store with a few hundred products. Each step feeds the next.
- Pick the category pages that matter. List the five to ten categories with the most search demand and the best margin. These are the pages the whole campaign serves. Product pages come along through the category links beneath them.
- Build one asset per category that people would cite. A buying guide with real measurements, a comparison of materials, a sizing study from your own returns data, a calculator. It must answer a question writers in your niche actually ask. Our link building pillar covers what makes an asset linkable.
- Link each asset to its category page. Put the link in the body copy near the top, with the category name as the anchor, then link to two or three best sellers. This is the step most stores skip, and it is the one Google's ecommerce guidance describes directly.
- Pitch the asset, not the product. Send it to the writers, editors and resource-page owners who already cover the topic. Use digital PR for data, resource page outreach for guides and broken link building where a dead page used to cover the same ground.
- Claim the links you have already earned. Stockists, press round-ups and gift guides often name your brand without linking. Find those mentions and ask for the link, as the link reclamation guide explains. Ask for the link to point at the category, not the homepage, when the article is about that category.
The steps are simple. The emailing is what stalls. Finding the right editor for each guide and following up is where most campaigns stop. GenLink does that part: it finds the pages and the person who can add the link, writes and sends the pitch, follows up and sorts the replies. The free tier runs one agent.
Which store pages actually earn links?#
Mostly the homepage and the content. Backlinko's ecommerce SEO guide says "Most of the links that point to ecommerce sites point to their homepage." Ahrefs says "It's usually easier to build links to your homepage or content than to your product pages themselves." LinkScope notes that "Journalists naturally link to brand homepages."
None of them puts a number on it. I looked for a public study that measures the share of ecommerce links landing on homepages, categories and products, and found none. The largest public dataset I found, from the UK digital PR agency Reboot Online, analysed "over 2 million backlinks that 98 ecommerce websites received" in 2024. It reports domain strength and link types, not where on the site the links point.
What it does show is that earned press links are much stronger than the average store link.
Reboot also reports that "86% of eCommerce brands are lacking optimised internal links," from 150 manual audits. If that holds anywhere near your store, the value from those stronger links is stopping at the page it landed on.
How internal links carry authority to product pages#
Google explains this on its own ecommerce page, Help Google understand your ecommerce site structure. It says Google "analyzes the linkages between pages to gain insights about the relative importance of different pages on a site," and that "the more links a page has to it within a site, the higher the relative importance of the page."
It then gives advice a store can act on this week: "if you have a best selling product, consider linking to it from the home page or in other content, such as blog posts or newsletters on your site." And for structure: "add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages."
In practice that means three rules. Every linkable asset links to its category in the body copy. Categories link to every product you want indexed, because Google says that "if category pages don't include direct links to all products in a category, Googlebot might not find all of your products by crawling alone." And anchors use the page's real name: Google's URL structure guidance asks for "the title of the product being linked to" rather than "click here." The internal linking guide covers anchors and placement in more depth.
Can I send free products for reviews and links?#
You can send products. You cannot make a link the condition and leave it as a normal link.
Google's spam policies list three forms of buying links. The third is specific to stores: "Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link." The same section says such links are fine "as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value." Google's link attribute page defines sponsored as the value for "advertisements or paid placements."
The reviewer has a second obligation. The US Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guidance answers the question "If I get a free product to review, do I need a disclosure no matter how I got it?" with "Yes." It adds that a brand sending products is "still on the hook" for the reviewer's deceptive claims.
The clean version of gifting is the one Ahrefs describes: "don't straight up offer to send authors your product in return for a backlink," but offer a sample "in return for feedback." If the reviewer later links to you in an honest, disclosed review, that is their editorial choice. If the link was the deal, it should be marked sponsored, and Google then treats it as a hint not to count it for ranking. The dofollow vs nofollow guide explains what each attribute does.
What the top seven ecommerce link building guides leave out#
I searched "ecommerce link building" on Bing on 1 October 2026 and read the seven ranking guides I could fetch in full: Search Logistics, Linkbuilder, LinkScope, Building Backlinks, Obsess AI, LinkForce and Serpzilla. The page in seventh place, from Network Solutions, blocked my fetch, so I used the eighth. The seven run from about 1,450 to 3,700 words and list 6 to 15 tactics each. I counted what each one does.
Six of the seven are published by companies that sell links, link placements or link building services. Only Obsess AI does not, and it sells AI-written blog content instead.
Three recommend sending free products to bloggers or reviewers. Only one of the three, Linkbuilder, mentions the sponsored attribute: "sponsored reviews and posts should be marked, and the link should have a "sponsored" tag." A few lines later it says: "If you want "Dofollow" links, you can certainly find sites willing to review your product and include these. However, you should be careful that the site in question doesn't mention the fact that you've encouraged them to review the product." That is advice to hide the arrangement Google's policy describes.
Obsess AI says gifting "is not the same as paying for a link." Its own source list links to Google's spam policy page, which names that exact practice as link spam.
The useful news is that five of the seven tell you to route authority through internal links, and four say outright that product pages rarely earn links. On the mechanics, the guides mostly agree with Google. Where they fall short is on measurement and disclosure: none measures where ecommerce links actually land, and only three link a Google document at all.
The limits of this evidence#
Seven pages from one search engine on one day is a snapshot, and the seventh-ranked page went unread. The 6 to 15 tactic counts depend on how each page numbers its own list. Reboot Online's data covers UK stores in 2024 and comes from an agency that sells digital PR, the tactic its numbers favour. And I found no public measurement of which store pages earn links, so the claim that links land on homepages and content rests on what practitioners report, not on a study.
The shape of the whole thing#
Stores do not get links to product pages by asking for links to product pages. They get links to things worth citing, and they wire those things to the pages that sell. Earn the link where it lands naturally. Move the value with internal links. And treat any link that came with a free product attached as an advert, because that is how Google's policy describes it.
Your job is the guide worth citing. The inbox is ours. Every linkable asset means a tailored note to each relevant editor and a follow-up that does not slip. Hand that to an agent and spend your time on the next asset.
Frequently asked questions#
Should I build links to product pages or category pages? Category pages, in most stores. They target broader searches, outlive individual products and link down to every product beneath them. Point a link at a product page only when the product is the subject of the article.
Are affiliate links backlinks? Not in the ranking sense. You pay a commission on every sale through them, which makes them paid placements, the case the sponsored attribute exists for. Treat affiliates as a sales channel, not a link building tactic.
What happens to links when a product is discontinued? If the page returns a 404, links to it stop helping the rest of the site. Redirect the old URL to the closest category or replacement product, and keep linkable guides on URLs that do not depend on stock.
Do links from influencer posts help SEO? A gifted or paid post should be disclosed under the FTC guidance and its link marked sponsored under Google's policy. Its value is traffic and awareness, not rankings.
How many backlinks does an ecommerce site need? There is no fixed number. Count the referring domains of the stores ranking above you for your main categories, using the method in the competitor backlink analysis guide, and size the gap from there.
Is buying links for an ecommerce site ever safe? A paid link is within Google's policy only when it is marked sponsored or nofollow, which tells Google not to count it for ranking. Paying for an unmarked link is the link spam the policy describes.
