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Perplexity.
A store has hundreds of pages, and the ones that make the money are the ones nobody wants to cite. A blogger writing about long-distance hiking has a good reason to link to a guide on preventing blisters. They have far less reason to link to your sock collection.
Most ecommerce link building advice skips that problem. It hands you a list of tactics and leaves you to work out how a two-person store gets there. This page starts one step earlier: which pages should receive links, which sites you can realistically win, and what happened when three stores actually asked.
The short version:
- Point most of your outreach at a guide, then pass that value to your category pages with internal links.
- Send outreach to a product page only when it's a best seller you plan to keep.
- Expect conditions. Of the 28 people who replied to three stores in our data, 24 asked for something or said no.
This guide is for small online stores and product brands that ship nationally or regionally. If your customers mostly walk in, maps and reviews will matter more than anything here.
Why a store's links work differently
Three things separate a store from, say, a software company building links:
- Your money pages are hard to cite. Neil Patel's ecommerce guide makes the same point about product and category pages, and Search Engine Land notes that many top publishers prefer linking to informational content.
- Your catalog changes. Products sell out, get replaced or disappear. Every deleted page can take its links with it.
- Publishers can ask you for goods. A software company gets asked for money. A store also gets asked for test units, commissions and product swaps, and each one comes with its own rules.
Decide where your links should point
Each page type on your site attracts different links. This table shows what you can expect from each one.
| Page | Who links to it | How you get the link | The limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Brand mentions, stockist lists, press | Ask for a link where you're already named | Charle warns that this is where extra links help least |
| Category page | Resource pages, some roundups | Send the exact URL, because Wix says journalists tend to default to the homepage | Hard to earn cold |
| Product page | Best-of lists, gift guides | Pitch one product for one slot | Wix calls this one of the hardest routes for smaller brands, and the link is at risk once the product goes |
| Guide or tool | Bloggers, resource pages, writers who need a source | Pitch it as useful for their readers | It doesn't sell by itself, so it needs internal links to your products |
If your store has few links today, use this order:
- Pick one or two categories that bring in most of your money.
- Build or improve one guide for each. Answer the question a buyer has just before choosing.
- Add product pages only for best sellers you expect to keep selling for years.
Pass the value along with internal links
Google's ecommerce guidance says the more internal links a page has, the more important it looks compared with your other pages. It also suggests linking a best seller from the home page or from content such as blog posts.
In practice, link from each guide to the category it supports, at the point where a reader asks what to buy. Then link back to the guide from the category page.
Protect the URLs that earn links
- Redirect a deleted product to its closest replacement, or to its category, not to the homepage. That's Neil Patel's advice, and Shopify lets you add this redirect when you delete a product.
- Keep one permanent URL for recurring sale pages, so links from last year's sale still work this year.
A worked example
Tarnwick Socks is an invented store, used here only to show the decision. It's a two-person business that ships across the US. It sells its own merino hiking socks plus two outside insole brands.
- Money page: the "Merino hiking socks" collection, which brings in most of its sales.
- Linkable page: a new guide on choosing sock thickness by season. It links to the collection at the two points where a reader asks what to buy.
- Product pages: only its all-season crew sock, which it plans to keep. Limited colors get no outreach.
- Sites to approach: the insole brands' "where to buy" pages, hiking blogs with gear resource pages (pitched the guide), and "best hiking socks" lists (pitched the crew sock).
None of this needs a large budget. The value is in the order: the guide exists before the first pitch goes out.
Which sites a small store can realistically win
Start near the top of this table and work down.
| Opportunity | Effort | The limit |
|---|---|---|
| Unlinked mentions | Low | A small brand has few of them |
| Supplier "where to buy" pages | Low | Only works if you resell brands that keep one |
| Best-of lists and gift guides | Medium | Many want a test unit, a commission or a fee |
| Sites linking to a competitor | Medium | Many of them sell their links |
| Resource pages | Medium | They want a guide, not a product |
| Journalist requests | Medium | Links tend to land on your homepage |
| Guest posts | High | You write the article, and most replies quote a price |
| Digital PR | High | BuzzStream puts it at $1,250 to $1,500 per unique link |
Free tools can do the first pass. You can find unlinked mentions of your brand and run a competitor backlink gap check in a few minutes. For the rest, see our guides to pitching resource pages, answering journalist requests and scoring backlink opportunities.
Before you pitch any site, ask three questions:
- Would its readers buy this kind of product? This matters more than any authority score.
- Does it look like it sells links? A rate card, or a "write for us" page covering unrelated topics, is a strong clue.
- Does it test products or earn commissions? Then expect a request for a unit or an affiliate deal, and decide your answer first.
Three store tactics, with honest effort and limits
Supplier "where to buy" pages
If you resell other brands, list them and look for a stockist, retailer or "where to buy" page on each brand's site. If your store isn't there, send one short email.
The effort is low, but the limits are real. The brand has to keep such a page, and some lists name stores without linking to them. Use a dofollow link checker on an existing retailer's link before you count on the value.
If you make your own products
Most guides treat supplier links as universal, but a maker has no supplier to ask. Your versions of this tactic are the retailers that carry you, plus trade bodies, certifications and awards you genuinely qualify for. Choose those for the customers who recognize them, not just for the link.
Gift guides and best-of lists
Find last year's guide on the site and note when it went live. That date tells you when to pitch next year. Then pitch one product for one section, and say who it suits.
The limits show up in the data below. Some lists only include products the writer has tested, and others want a commission. If you're reading this in November, many of this year's guides may already be set. Evergreen best-of lists have no season, so pitch those now and put next year's guides on your calendar.
What happened when three stores asked
Between October 2 and November 2, 2026, Mentiohunt emailed sites for three stores that sell physical products. Those emails reached 260 sites, and 28 people replied, including no's. We read each reply and sorted it by what the person wanted.
| How the site was found | Replied | Asked for money or sent paid terms | Asked for a commission, unit or swap | Open, no condition | Declined |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best-of lists | 11 of 124 (8.9%, likely 5–15%) | 5 | 4 | 0 | 2 |
| Sites linking to a competitor | 7 of 65 (10.8%, likely 5–21%) | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Guest post pitches | 8 of 33 (24.2%, likely 13–41%) | 7 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Resource pages | 1 of 33 (3.0%, likely under 1–15%) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Unlinked mentions | 1 of 5 (too few for a rate) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| All sites | 28 of 260 (10.8%, likely 8–15%) | 14 | 6 | 4 | 4 |
The likely ranges are 95% confidence intervals, and they're wide. Here's how to read the table:
- This is a small, young sample. It covers three stores and one month, and replies can arrive weeks after the first email, so these rates may change. It's too small to say whether stores do better or worse than other businesses, and too small to rank tactics.
- A reply is not a link. Only 4 of the 28 replies came with no visible condition, and even those aren't live links yet.
- The highest reply rate was mostly sellers. Guest post pitches looked best, but 7 of the 8 replies were paid offers. That fits our wider data on what publishers quote in reply to free outreach, where 72% of guest post replies asked for money.
- Six replies were store-specific. They asked for a commission, a test unit or a product swap. The next section covers how to answer those.
Domain Rating (DR), a 0 to 100 score of a site's link strength, didn't make replies easier to predict. Under DR 30, 6 of 83 sites replied (7.2%, likely 3–15%). At DR 30 to 49, 14 of 107 replied (13.1%, likely 8–21%). At DR 50 and over, 8 of 68 replied (11.8%, likely 6–22%). Those ranges overlap, so the fair reading is narrow: a low score didn't bring more replies. Check relevance first.
Free products, commissions and swaps: what is safe
Every condition in that table has a rule attached.
- Free products. Google's spam policies list sending someone a product in exchange for a write-up with a link as link spam, even though some ecommerce guides still recommend it. Google's 2016 advice for bloggers says to nofollow those links and disclose the relationship, ideally at the top. In the US, FTC guidance also applies to bloggers who get free products expecting to promote them. Lending a unit for an honest review is normal marketing, but never make the link a condition, and treat it as a sales tactic.
- Commissions. An affiliate program can sell products, but Wix says it doesn't do much for SEO. Google's policies accept affiliate links when they're handled properly, so set one up for the sales, not the rankings.
- Swaps. Google lists excessive link exchanges as link spam. A real partnership between two complementary stores is different from a habit of "link to me and I'll link to you", so keep swaps rare and useful to readers.
- Paid links. Google accepts that links get bought and sold, as long as they're qualified with
sponsoredornofollow. A site promising an unmarked paid link is offering something against that policy.
What to skip
- Link swaps routed through a third site. Hiding a swap doesn't stop it being one.
- Paid guest post networks. They reach store owners with the same offer they send everyone, and relevance is an afterthought.
- Coupon sites as a link source. They bring discount hunters, and your buyers aren't reading those pages for advice.
- A retainer before you have a linkable page. BuzzStream reports published agency retainers of $2,500 to $10,000 a month. That's hard to justify when the page an editor would link to doesn't exist yet.
A routine one owner can keep
- Pick your pages: one or two categories and one guide for each.
- Fix the internal links between each guide and its category.
- Ask your suppliers, or apply to the trade bodies and certifications that fit if you make your own products.
- Work through unlinked mentions, which are the warmest requests you can send.
- Keep steady outreach running to best-of lists and resource pages, using a backlink request template, blogger outreach templates and our guide to writing the outreach email.
Step five is the one that usually stalls. Finding sites, finding the right person and following up all compete with packing orders.
That's the part Mentiohunt runs. Its free preview shows 3 to 5 real opportunities when enough strong matches exist, with no card required and nothing sent. If you activate it, Mentiohunt runs outreach through a prospect's first reply. You monitor the queue, cancel anything that doesn't fit, and take over the conversation yourself, including any request for money, a unit or a swap.
It doesn't do digital PR, seed products or send samples, and supplier requests stay with you. It searches for best-of lists by product category rather than gift guides, so a gift guide you spot yourself can be submitted as a URL on a paid plan (up to 20 a day). No tool can promise placements or replies, but you can see a free preview of the sites that fit your store before deciding.
Founder of Mentiohunt. Built the company's own backlink pipeline across multiple industries before turning it into a product. Writes about link prospecting and founder-led distribution.
Turn this playbook into a recurring opportunity queue.
Mentiohunt turns your site, competitors and keywords into a scored queue of backlink opportunities, then runs the outreach through the first reply. The preview is free and sends nothing.
