Internal linking strategy for large e-commerce category pages

[elena_p]

We have 400+ category pages and thousands of product pages. The category pages get good PageRank but it barely trickles down to individual products. Any specific strategies for e-commerce internal linking at scale?

[john_ecom]

For e-commerce, the key is making sure your best-converting products appear in multiple category paths, not just their primary category. Use 'related products', 'also bought', and 'recently viewed' sections strategically — make sure your top products appear in these across high-traffic pages.

[Oliver W.]

John's right. Additionally, use LinkJuice to identify which category pages have the highest internal PageRank, then make sure your highest-margin or highest-converting products appear prominently on those pages — not just paginated deep in the results.

Also check for pagination orphans: products on page 3+ of a category that receive zero direct links. These are often completely invisible to crawlers.

[Noah]

Quick tip for anyone confused about orphans: filter out your pagination pages first (URLs with ?page= or /page/2/ patterns). These often show as orphans because the canonical points away from them, but they're not really missing links — they're just correctly de-indexed. Focus the orphan fix on unique content URLs only.

[Chris]

The redirect chain flag has been a goldmine for us. Found 847 internal links pointing to old redirect URLs after a CMS migration. Fixing those took two weeks but the crawl efficiency improvement was massive — Google started finding new content 3x faster based on our GSC coverage reports.