How to Fix: Products well-linked

Products well-linked is an important SEO check in the E-Commerce SEO (WooCommerce) category. This is a medium-priority issue. While not urgent, fixing it will improve your overall SEO health.

What this check is really about

This check looks at whether your product pages are connected to the rest of your store by internal links — or stranded. A product that is only reachable through paginated category archives is what I call an orphan: a page Google has to work hard to find, and a page that inherits almost no ranking strength from the rest of your site. In a WooCommerce catalog of any real size, orphaned and thinly linked products are the quiet reason a chunk of your inventory never ranks and never sells through search.

Why this matters for SEO

Internal links are how PageRank and crawl priority move through your store. Get them right and the whole catalog lifts:

• Well-linked products get crawled more often and reindexed faster after you change price or stock
• Internal links pass authority from strong pages (your homepage, top categories, bestsellers) to deeper products
• Related-product and cross-sell links raise average order value while doing SEO work at the same time
• Orphaned products can drop out of the index entirely, taking their revenue with them

How to check where you stand

1. Crawl your site with a tool like Screaming Frog and look at the “internal links in-count” for product URLs — anything with one or zero is effectively orphaned.
2. Compare the product count in your XML sitemap against the number of product pages a crawler can actually reach by following links.
3. Check Search Console’s “Discovered – currently not indexed” bucket; it is often full of poorly linked products.
4. Run the SEO Roadmap audit to see which products this check flags.

How to Fix This in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: varies

WooCommerce gives you most of the linking tools already — the job is turning them on and using them deliberately.

Step 1: Use Up-sells and Cross-sells on every product

Open a product in WooCommerce, go to the Linked Products tab, and fill in up-sells and cross-sells. These are not just merchandising fields — they generate real internal links from one product to another. Prioritize your bestsellers as the linking sources, because they carry the most authority to pass down to the deeper catalog.

Step 2: Make categories, attributes, and bestseller blocks do the work

Assign every product to a sensible category and to relevant attributes, so it is reachable through more than one path. Add “featured” or “related” product blocks to your homepage and key landing pages, and link from your blog content to the specific products it discusses. The goal is that no product sits more than a few clicks from the homepage.

Step 3: Hunt down the orphans, then verify

Use your crawl from earlier to find products with one or zero internal links and give each one a home — a category, a related-products block, a mention in a buying guide. Then clear your cache, re-run the SEO Roadmap audit to confirm the check passes, and re-crawl to confirm the orphan count has dropped.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

These tools can help you fix and prevent this issue:

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Relying only on paginated category pages, which bury deep products behind many clicks
• Leaving the Linked Products tab empty on every product
• Building related-product logic that only ever links the same handful of items
• Ignoring the orphan report because those products “don’t sell anyway” — often they don’t sell because nothing links to them

Need More Help?

If you’re still having trouble fixing this issue, consider:

• Consulting with a WordPress developer or SEO specialist
• Checking the WordPress support forums for similar issues
• Reviewing your theme and plugin documentation
• Running a complete site audit with SEO Roadmap for a prioritized action plan

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.