Internal linking: steering equity toward priority categories
Internal links are the only ranking resource you fully control. Here is how to stop scattering them across the footer and point them at the pages that make money.
What internal linking actually distributes
Internal links do three jobs at once: they pass a share of link equity, they set crawl priority, and they tell the engine what the destination page is about through anchor text.
The third job is the most underrated. An internal anchor is your own description of a page and, unlike external anchors, entirely under your control. Links anchored 'read more' or 'here' carry no semantics at all.
Equity distribution, simplified: a page's weight is split across all outgoing links. A hundred footer links on every page mean most of the site's equity endlessly circulates among utility sections.
Crawl depth as a metric
Depth is the number of clicks from the homepage along the shortest path. Practical rule: commercially significant pages within three clicks, everything else no deeper than five.
Measure it with a crawler — the Crawl Depth column in Screaming Frog. Chart the distribution of pages by depth; an unoptimised shop typically shows a long tail of thousands of products at depth six to eight, which the crawler visits every few months.
Depth can be reduced without restructuring: 'popular products' and 'category bestsellers' blocks on higher-level pages, curated collections, and links from blog articles to product pages.
A scheme for e-commerce
The homepage links to every first-level category and to eight to twelve priority subcategories. Do not try to expose the entire tree on the homepage — that is precisely the scattering problem.
A category page links to subcategories, to products and horizontally to adjacent categories. A product page links back through breadcrumbs, to related products and to relevant blog articles where they exist.
Breadcrumbs are mandatory and must be marked up with schema.org/BreadcrumbList. They cut depth, provide anchored links to categories and change the snippet to show a path instead of a bare URL.
Anchors: how to phrase them
The anchor should describe the destination the way people search for it: not 'our catalogue' but 'inverter air conditioners'. At the same time avoid using one identical exact anchor everywhere — natural patterns vary the phrasing.
On a multilingual site, anchors within each language version must be in that language and point at pages of that same version. A link from an Uzbek page to a Russian category breaks both the user journey and language segmentation.
Do not overdo exact match. Fifteen consecutive commercially anchored links inside body copy read as a link block rather than navigation, and engines discount such blocks.
Where equity leaks
The main leaks: a fifty-link footer repeated site-wide; links to filter and sort pages; links to utility sections such as cart, account and comparison; tag pages duplicating categories.
Block utility sections with meta robots noindex, follow — the crawler follows onward links but keeps the page out of the index. Remove template links to them wherever users do not need them.
A separate offender is a site-wide 'latest articles' block on every shop page. It pushes equity into a blog that does not sell. If the blog is needed, use targeted links to relevant articles instead of a global block.
Measuring the effect
Before the changes, record the depth distribution and the number of internal inlinks to priority URLs — both are in the crawler. Re-measure afterwards and confirm priority pages improved on both.
Then watch the Crawl Stats report in Search Console: redistributed internal links usually show up as a change in crawl frequency for priority sections within a few weeks.
Do not expect fast ranking gains from linking alone. It is an amplifier: it speeds indexing and helps already-relevant pages, but it does not create relevance where none exists.