Link Building
Link building is the work of earning relevant links from other websites so Google sees your pages as more trustworthy and authoritative.
What is Link Building?
Link building is the part of SEO where you work to get other websites to link to your pages. Each inbound link (backlink) acts as a kind of recommendation, and Google uses the overall volume and quality of links as one of its most important ranking signals. Links from authoritative, topically relevant sites carry far more weight than many links from thin or spammy sites — it is about quality, not count.
Why does Link Building matter?
In an online store you often compete against established players for the same commercial keywords. Solid on-page work and organic traffic only go so far; on hard keywords, strong backlinks are frequently what decides who ranks on page 1. Relevant links pass authority to your product and category pages and also drive direct referral traffic from buyers who are ready to purchase.
Common use cases
- Digital PR and coverage, where products or data earn press mentions that include a link.
- Guest content and industry media that link back to relevant category or guide pages.
- Product reviews and collaborations with bloggers and creators in your niche.
- Anchor text strategy, controlling which anchor text links use without over-optimizing.
- Cleaning up harmful links, such as paid links that could trigger a manual action from Google.
Shopify perspective
Link building is off-site work and cannot be set up inside the Shopify admin — it requires outreach and relationships. Avoid bought links and link farms; they violate Google’s spam policies and can trigger a penalty. Focus instead on editorially earned links to your strongest pages. Keep in mind that rel="nofollow" links (for example from social media or comments) rarely pass ranking value, but can still send relevant traffic.