Link Building for Ecommerce: SEO Strategies That Work for Shopify Stores

Key Takeaways

• Links still count. Google's own description of how Search works says one factor used to judge quality is whether other prominent websites link to or refer to the content.
• Fewer links matter more than they used to, and the wrong ones hurt: Google's spam policies treat bought links, link swaps, mass directory links and widely distributed footer links as link spam.
• Most stores lose links before they build any. Of the last 80 stores we migrated to Shopify, 75 arrived with no redirect map, so every link to an old product or collection URL was pointing at a dead page.
• An online store has links it already deserves: suppliers, stockists, brand partners, awards, trade bodies and the press that has mentioned it without linking.
• Content people cite earns links on its own. Our own blog's citations in AI answers keep growing, and we earned them with statistics articles, guides and free tools rather than outreach.
• Judge a link by relevance, real readers, placement and anchor text, not by a third party authority score, and expect results over months rather than weeks.

Quick Answer

Link building for an ecommerce store means earning links from relevant websites so that Google sees your products and guides as referenced and trusted, and so that real people arrive from those sites. The strategies that work in 2026 are, in order of effort: fix the links you already have, including redirects from old URLs and unlinked brand mentions; claim the links you already deserve from suppliers, stockists, partners and awards; earn coverage by answering journalist requests as the founder; publish statistics pages, calculators and guides that other writers cite; and run digital PR campaigns built on your own data. Avoid paid links without a sponsored label, link exchanges and directory packages, which Google classes as link spam.

Table of Contents

• What Is SEO Link Building, and Does It Still Work?
• What Google Treats as Link Spam
• The Links an Online Store Already Has a Claim To
• Link Building Strategies That Work for Ecommerce
• What a Good Link Looks Like
• How Many Links Does a Shopify Store Need?
• What Does Link Building Cost in the UK?
• Link Building Mistakes That Cost Stores Rankings
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Articles

Link building has a bad reputation among Shopify merchants, and most of it is deserved. The emails offering guest posts on sites nobody reads, the packages of 50 directory links, the agencies that report links by the hundred but cannot show a single visitor from any of them: all of that is what Google now calls link spam. This guide is about the other kind, the links an online store earns because it is a real business with suppliers, stockists, customers, data and a founder who knows the category. Those links still move rankings, and they bring buyers in their own right.

What Is SEO Link Building, and Does It Still Work?

SEO link building is the work of earning links from other websites to your own so that search engines see your pages as referenced and trusted. It still works because Google still uses links. Its own explanation of how Search ranks results says that one of the factors used to determine quality is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. The word "prominent" carries the whole lesson: a link from a site your customers read is a vote; a link from a site built to sell links is not.

What has changed is the weight and the risk. Google's helpful content guidance asks whether a page provides original information, reporting, research or analysis, and never mentions link building at all, because links are meant to follow from content people find useful rather than be manufactured around it. At the same time, the scale of the web makes links scarce: Ahrefs' study of about 14 billion pages (December 2023) found that 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google at all, and a large share have no referring domains. A store with thirty relevant links is already ahead of most of the web.

There is a second reason to care in 2026. AI assistants build their answers from pages they can cite, and the sites they cite are the sites other sites refer to. Our own blog's citations in AI answers keep growing month on month, even where visits from AI assistants have not yet caught up, and we have earned every one of them with statistics articles, guides and free tools rather than outreach. Links and citations are now the same job.

What Google Treats as Link Spam

Google's spam policies (last updated 28 August 2026) define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate rankings. The policies name the practices below, and the same page carries the site reputation policy, which covers third party content published on a host site mainly to borrow the ranking signals that host earned from its own content. Each row shows the practice, Google's position and the honest alternative.

The attribute rules matter for any store that pays for coverage, sends products to reviewers or runs an affiliate programme. The same spam policies say paid links are acceptable for advertising or sponsorship when they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored", and Google's Search Central page on qualifying outbound links adds rel="ugc" for comments and forum posts; links with any of these attributes are generally not followed. A labelled paid link cannot pass ranking value, but it can still send customers, which is the only reason to pay for one. UK law points the same way: paragraph 12 of Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans using paid editorial content to promote a product without making clear that it is paid for.

The Links an Online Store Already Has a Claim To

Before building anything, collect what is already yours. In our experience most stores have more lost and unclaimed links than they have ever built.

• Links to pages that no longer exist. Of the last 80 stores we migrated to Shopify, 75 arrived with no redirect map. Every link to an old product, collection or blog URL on those stores pointed at a dead page until we rebuilt the redirects. Export your old URLs, check them in Ahrefs or Search Console, and redirect anything with links or traffic; our Shopify migration checklist covers the method.
• Mentions without a link. Search your brand name, your founder's name and your flagship product name in a tool with a web index (Ahrefs, Semrush or even Google with the brand in quotes). Journalists, bloggers and stockists often name a brand without linking; a short, polite email asking for the link succeeds more often than any outreach campaign.
• Suppliers and manufacturers. Roasters list the cafes that serve their coffee, fabric mills list the brands that use their cloth, and ingredient suppliers list their customers. Ask to be included, with a link.
• Stockists, marketplaces and partners. If you are stocked in independent shops, sell through a marketplace or run a charity or sustainability partnership, each of those sites has a page that can and should link to you.
• Awards, trade bodies and local organisations. Award shortlists, trade association member pages, the local chamber of commerce and business improvement districts all link to members. These are the few directories worth having.
• Your own other pages. Internal links cost nothing and carry authority to the product and collection pages that need it. Link every guide you publish to the products it discusses.

Link Building Strategies That Work for Ecommerce

The ladder below orders the sources by effort. Start at the bottom; most stores never need to leave the first three rungs to beat the sites they compete with.

1. Fix and claim first. Redirects, unlinked mentions and supplier, stockist and partner links, as above. This is a week of work, and for a small store it often adds more referring domains than months of outreach.
2. Answer journalist requests as the founder. Journalists at national and trade titles send requests for expert comment every day through services such as ResponseSource and under the #journorequest tag on social networks. A founder who can explain, say, why coffee goes stale or how nappies are tested will earn links from titles no outreach campaign could reach. Reply within the hour, keep it short, and give a quotable sentence.
3. Publish the numbers your category lacks. Statistics pages earn links for years because writers need a figure to cite and a page to point at. We publish sector statistics articles for exactly this reason, from Shopify statistics for the UK to ecommerce returns statistics, and they are among the most cited pages we own. A store can do the same with its own order data: the most popular sizes, when customers reorder, what returns cost.
4. Build a tool people use. Calculators and checkers earn links because they save the reader a job; we built our ROAS calculator for exactly that reason. A coffee brand could publish a brew ratio calculator; a skincare brand a routine builder; a pet food brand a feeding guide by weight.
5. Run a digital PR campaign when you have a story. A campaign is a piece of research, a survey, an index or a stunt pitched to the press, and it only works when the story is genuinely interesting. Our guide to PR for ecommerce brands explains how to find one. Expect a campaign to take two to three months from idea to coverage.
6. Send product to reviewers, with the right label. Product reviews are useful coverage, but Google counts a free product in return for an article with a link as a paid link, so ask the reviewer to mark the link rel="sponsored" and judge the placement on the readers it brings. The same applies to affiliates: the Awin programme we launched for Awake Organic reached 210 active publishers within three days, and every one of those links is labelled; they earn sales, not rankings, and our guide to Awin for Shopify brands explains the model.
7. Write for other sites only where it is editorial. A guest article on a trade title that would run it anyway, written by the founder on a subject they know, is coverage. The same article sold as a placement on a site that publishes anything is link spam, and under the site reputation policy it can hurt the host as well as you.

What a Good Link Looks Like

Five signals separate a link worth having from one that is noise. Google's own SEO starter guide supplies the fourth: link text tells users and Google something about the page you are linking to, and repeating the same words over and over is keyword stuffing, which its spam policies cover.

Third party scores need a word of caution. Domain Authority is Moz's own number and Domain Rating is Ahrefs' own number. Each estimates link strength from that company's own crawl on a scale of 1 to 100, and neither is a figure Google uses. They are useful for comparing two candidate sites at a glance, and useless as a target. A DR 20 trade magazine that your customers read beats a DR 60 general blog that nobody does.

How Many Links Does a Shopify Store Need?

Enough to match the sites that rank for the searches you want, and no more than that. Take your five most valuable searches, list the pages ranking in the top five for each, and count their referring domains in Ahrefs or Semrush. If they average 80 and you have 12, that is the gap. If they average 15, your problem is probably not links, and our Shopify technical SEO audit will find it faster than outreach will.

Count referring domains, not links: ten links from one site are one vote. Then look at what kind of links the leaders have. In most ecommerce categories they are stockist pages, press coverage, supplier listings and a few guides that writers cite, which is exactly the ladder above. Nobody in the top five got there with directory packages.

What Does Link Building Cost in the UK?

The honest answer is that the best links cost time rather than money. Fixing redirects, claiming supplier and stockist links and answering journalist requests need a few hours a week from someone who knows the business, usually the founder. Statistics pages and calculators cost what any good piece of content costs to research, write and build.

Agency fees cluster in two forms. Digital PR specialists usually price per campaign or on a monthly retainer, and the strongest publish neither. Our Shopify SEO agency includes digital PR and link building inside an SEO retainer, with prices published on our website: retainers start from £650 a month plus VAT, clients are billed one month in arrears and nobody is tied into a long contract. Whatever you pay, ask for the links by URL each month, with the visits they sent, and ignore any report that counts links without naming them.

Link Building Mistakes That Cost Stores Rankings

• Buying unlabelled links. The cheapest way to earn a manual action and the hardest to undo.
• Over optimised anchor text. A hundred links all reading "best organic coffee UK" look manufactured because they are. Natural links use the brand name, the product name or a plain phrase.
• Losing links in a migration. The most common and most expensive mistake we see: 75 of the last 80 stores we migrated had no redirect map. Build it before you switch platforms.
• Chasing authority scores. A high DR site with no readers in your category sends nothing and tells Google little.
• Ignoring internal links. New product pages with no links from your own guides and collections start at a disadvantage you control.
• Reporting links instead of results. If an agency cannot show which links sent visitors or moved a ranking, it is selling volume.

Why Matters Perspective

We came to link building through migrations. When 75 of 80 stores arrive without a redirect map, the first SEO job is not building anything, it is stopping the bleeding, and the stores that do that alone often recover rankings they had written off. After that, the work that pays is unglamorous: supplier and stockist links, the founder on a journalist request, one good data page a quarter. It is also the work that AI assistants reward, because they cite the pages other pages cite; our own citations in AI answers have grown steadily on the back of statistics articles and tools rather than outreach.

If you want this done for your store, our Shopify SEO agency runs technical SEO, content, digital PR and link building as one plan, and the free SEO audit will show you the links you have lost before anything is built. We are a Shopify Select partner with Verified Skills across development and marketing, our prices are published, retainer clients are billed one month in arrears and never tied into long contracts, and development projects carry a 3 month guarantee.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO link building?

SEO link building is earning links from other websites to yours so that search engines see your pages as referenced and trusted. Google says one of the factors it uses to judge quality is whether other prominent websites link to or refer to the content, so links from relevant, real sites still help a store rank.

Does link building still work for SEO?

Yes, but fewer links matter more than they used to, and the wrong links can hurt. Google's spam policies treat bought links, link exchanges and mass directory links as link spam. Links from suppliers, stockists, press coverage and pages people genuinely cite still move rankings and bring visitors in their own right.

How many backlinks does an ecommerce site need?

There is no fixed number. Compare your store with the sites ranking for your target searches in a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush: if they have links from 80 referring domains and you have 12, the gap is the target. Aim to close it with relevant links over months, not to hit a round number.

What is a good DA for link building?

Domain Authority is Moz's own score and Domain Rating is Ahrefs' own score. Both estimate link strength from their own crawls, and neither is a figure Google uses. Use them to compare candidate sites, but judge a link by whether the site is relevant, has real readers and would send you a visitor.

Is buying links against Google's rules?

Yes, if the link is meant to pass ranking value. Google's spam policies count paying money, exchanging goods or services, or sending a free product in return for an article with a link as link spam. Paid placements are fine when the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which tells Google not to count it.

How much does link building cost in the UK?

It depends on the route. Fixing lost links and claiming supplier and stockist links costs time rather than money. Digital PR campaigns are usually priced per campaign or inside a monthly SEO retainer. Our Shopify SEO retainers, which include digital PR and link building, start from £650 a month plus VAT and are published on our website.

What is the difference between digital PR and link building?

Digital PR earns coverage by giving journalists something worth writing about, such as data, a story or an expert comment, and links follow from the coverage. Link building is the wider job of getting links from anywhere relevant, including suppliers, partners, directories and content people cite. Good digital PR is one part of link building, not a replacement for it.

Final Thoughts

Link building for an ecommerce store is mostly a matter of claiming what the business already deserves and then publishing things worth citing. Fix the redirects, ask the suppliers and stockists, answer the journalist, publish the numbers your category lacks, and label anything you pay for. That is slower than buying a package, and it is the only version that still works.

If you would like us to find the links your store has lost, request the free SEO audit or email us. For the rest of the picture, our guide to optimising a Shopify store for SEO covers everything on the page, and this guide covers what happens off it.

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• Generative Engine Optimisation for Ecommerce: A Practical GEO Guide
• The Complete Shopify Migration Checklist: Before, During and After
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