The advice in most internal linking posts is: open the page, find a relevant phrase, link it to the page you want to rank. That works, and I recommend it, and it does not survive contact with a catalogue of nine thousand products.
Nobody is hand-placing links on nine thousand pages. So the question on a large site is different: what structures produce good internal links automatically, and which of the automatic ones you already have are working against you?
Start by auditing what the templates already do
On a large site, almost every internal link on the page was placed by a template, not a person. So the first job is not adding links. It is reading what the templates are already saying.
Take one product page and count where its links go. Typically: the main navigation, a breadcrumb, a “related products” block, a “recently viewed” block, the footer. That is the entire vote that page casts, repeated across the whole catalogue.
Now ask what those blocks are ranked by. Related products is usually “same category, random” or “same category, newest”. Nobody chose that. It means every product on the site is passing its links to an arbitrary handful of siblings, and the pages you actually want ranking are getting no more than the ones you do not.
The four structures that do the work
Breadcrumbs. The highest-value automatic internal link on an ecommerce site and the cheapest to get right. Every product links up to its category, every category to its parent. That is a clean hierarchy expressed in links, generated for free, and a surprising number of sites either lack them or have them pointing at a flat structure that does not reflect the categories.
Category and collection pages, treated as real pages. These are the hubs. If a category page is a grid with no copy, it has nothing to link out from except the grid. Two paragraphs of intro copy on a category page is not a content exercise. It is a place to put contextual links to the subcategories and the two or three products that matter most.
Related items, ranked deliberately. Change “random within category” to something with intent behind it: best sellers, higher margin, the products you have decided to compete on. This is one template change that reweights the entire catalogue.
The blog pointing at the catalogue. On most stores the blog links to the blog and nothing else. A closed circuit. Every post should link to at least one page that sells something, in the body, with descriptive anchor text.
What the aggregate data suggests
In the 2024 Web Almanac, the median page across the whole web carried 41 internal links. On the top thousand sites by traffic the median was 129.
I would not read that as cause and effect, since large sites have more pages to link to. But the direction matches what I find: the sites that are winning have dense, deliberate internal linking, and the sites I get called into have whatever the theme shipped with.
What I would not do
Automated keyword-to-link plugins. They produce links nobody chose, with anchor text that repeats site-wide, and they will eventually link a word in a customer review to a category page. The value of an internal link is partly that somebody decided to put it there.
The automated checks will not catch the resulting mess either. The 2025 Web Almanac found 86.6% of mobile home pages pass Lighthouse’s descriptive-link-text audit, but that test catches “click here” and nothing else. It has no opinion on a site where every link is generated, repeated site-wide, and pointing at whatever the plugin matched.
- A sitewide block of forty links. If every page links to forty things, none of them is being emphasised. This applies to fat footers especially.
- Ignoring the orphans. Before any of the above, run the crawl with the sitemap fed in and find out how many pages have nothing pointing at them. On one catalogue that number was 8,317 out of 9,220. No amount of template tuning matters while nine pages in ten are unreachable.
The short version
- At scale, links are placed by templates, not people. Audit the templates first.
- Read one product page’s outgoing links, because that is the vote every page is casting.
- Breadcrumbs are the cheapest high-value structure.
- Category pages need copy so they have somewhere to link from.
- Rank “related items” deliberately instead of randomly. One change, whole catalogue.
- Point the blog at things that sell.
- Find the orphans before any of this. Nothing else matters if the pages are unreachable.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Internal linking is the cheapest link building there is. This is the version for sites too big to do it by hand. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
