The Most Common Ecommerce Backlink Types (and How to Earn Them)

Why Product Pages Attract the Fewest Links

People link to pages that inform, entertain or prove a point — and a product page does none of those things. It exists to transact, which is why even well-loved stores accumulate backlinks at a fraction of the rate of publishers. Even loyal customers rarely link to a checkout page unprompted. Earning links straight to product URLs is therefore the hardest discipline in ecommerce SEO, and pretending otherwise wastes outreach effort on the least receptive targets. The channels below fix that imbalance.

The workable strategy is indirect. Build link-worthy assets around the store — buying guides, comparison pages, data studies — and route their authority into product pages through internal links. Then earn product-page links through the specific channels where they do happen naturally: supplier networks, reviewers, gift guides and journalists. It is the sequence we run for ecommerce clients at Topseoservices, and the rest of this article walks through those channels in rough order of effort, cheapest first.

Supplier and Stockist Links

The easiest legitimate product links come from your own supply chain. Manufacturers keep where-to-buy, dealer and stockist directories that link to every authorised seller, and industry brands list certified partners on their sites. Find each supplier's partner page, check the listing requirements, and request inclusion with your exact product URLs. These links are relevant, permanent and free — and because they sit on sites Google already associates with your category, they carry more weight than their modest authority suggests.

Unlinked Mentions and Review Outreach

Somewhere on the web, someone has already praised your product without linking to you — in a blog roundup, a forum thread, a news piece. Set alerts for your brand and product names, and when you find a mention, send a short, grateful note asking for a link; conversion rates on unlinked-mention requests embarrass most outreach because the writer has already done the hard part. Review the mention first: a passing name-drop may not deserve a link, but most roundups will add one for the reader's sake.

Review outreach is the heavier version. Identify bloggers, YouTubers and Instagram reviewers whose audiences match your product, send the product rather than a pitch deck, offer it with no conditions, and accept whatever honest verdict follows — including the possibility of no coverage. Where the platform allows links, ask for one; many will be nofollow, which is still fine for referral traffic and brand searches. A handful of genuine reviews each quarter beats any volume of paid placements nobody trusts.

Gift Guides, Seasonal Roundups and Broken Links

Journalists and bloggers build gift guides and seasonal roundups weeks before the season — Diwali lists, Christmas roundups, Valentine's edits — and they need products worth featuring. Pitch two to three months early with a concise pitch: what the product is, its price band, why it suits the list's theme, high-resolution images, and a ready-to-use description the writer can adapt. Once you appear in one guide, ask which others the writer produces; the second placement from the same relationship costs one email.

Broken-link building suits ecommerce because product pages die constantly. Find resource pages in your niche that link to discontinued products or dead stores, verify the link is genuinely broken, and offer your equivalent page as the replacement — Ahrefs and Semrush both surface broken outbound links quickly. Check adjacent niches as well. The pitch writes itself, because you are helping a webmaster fix their page rather than asking a favour. Response rates are modest, but the win rate per reply is the best in link building.

Journalist Requests and Data Stories

Journalist request services — HARO and its peers — remain the fastest route to links from news domains. Set alerts for your category, respond within hours with one quotable sentence and a credential, and expect a hit rate in the low single digits. When a quote lands in a national publication with a link to your store, one placement can outweigh months of directory submissions. Speed and specificity decide everything; journalists pick the first useful reply, not the best one.

Your order data is a link asset most stores ignore. Aggregated and anonymised — seasonal demand shifts, gifting patterns, category growth, city-level trends — it becomes the original statistic journalists cannot find elsewhere, and original data earns links without asking. Pitch trade press first, then consumer outlets; one well-packaged study per year will typically outperform every other tactic on this list combined. Keep the methodology transparent and the sample honest, because credibility is the entire product.

Marketplaces, Affiliates and the Free Internal Link

Marketplace links — Amazon, Flipkart, eBay and their industry equivalents — rarely pass authority to your own site, but the platforms themselves rank for product queries and drive real sales, and reviews earned there feed buyer trust on your own site. The strategy is deliberate separation: use marketplaces for reach and reviews, and reserve your site's link-building for the pages you own. Where a marketplace profile allows a website link, take it, but never let marketplace performance decide your own-site content plan; they measure different things.

Affiliate links, meanwhile, arrive wrapped in rel="sponsored" or nofollow attributes — right for compliance, irrelevant for PageRank — so treat affiliates as a revenue channel rather than an SEO one. The undervalued backlink is the one you control: internal links from blog content to product pages, from category to category, and from every relevant page to its conversion page. External links win new authority; internal links decide where the authority you already have is spent. Most stores need the second kind far more than the first.