Which pages need links: homepage, category or content?

Links do not spread evenly across a site, and they should not. Most natural links go to the homepage and to informational pages such as research, tools and guides. Commercial pages, the ones that make the money, attract few on their own. The question is how to get the benefit to the pages that need it without building a profile that no real business has.

Think about it at three levels: the site, the folder and the page.

Site level: the homepage carries everyone

The homepage is where most brand links land. Journalists, directories, partners and customers link to the name, and the name resolves to the homepage.

That authority is shared. The leaked Google documentation includes a field that stores the homepage’s PageRank value against every document on the site. Analysts read this as homepage authority acting as a default for pages that have no signals of their own yet. The field is documented. How much weight it carries is unknown.

The practical point is simple. Homepage links are never wasted, they carry branded anchors that keep the profile natural, and they help every new page you publish.

Folder level: find the thin sections

Before you choose individual pages, look at how links are spread across sections. This is a working method.

1. Export referring domains per URL from your backlink tool.
2. Group the URLs by folder, such as blog, category, product, guides and tools.
3. Do the same for two or three competitors that rank.
4. Compare the share each folder holds, not only the totals.

You will usually find that one folder holds most of your links and that it is not the one you need to rank. A competitor whose category folder holds a visible share of its links is telling you what that market requires. A competitor whose links all sit on the blog and homepage, with category pages ranking anyway, is telling you that internal links and site authority are doing the work.

Relevance works at these levels as well. The order of importance practitioners use is the page first, then the section, then the domain.

Page level: what each type attracts

Page type	Links it attracts naturally	Typical anchors	What to do
Homepage	Many: brand mentions, press, partners, directories	Brand and URL	Keep earning them. They lift the whole site
Informational assets: research, tools, guides	Many, when the asset is worth citing	Titles and topical phrases	Build these on purpose and link from them to commercial pages
Category and service pages	Few	Rarely natural	Support with internal links first, then direct links chosen with care
Product pages	Few	Rarely natural	Rely on category pages and internal links before direct links

Why commercial pages are the hard case

Nobody links to a category page out of interest. A direct link to one is therefore more likely to be a placed link, and a run of placed links with keyword anchors is the kind of pattern Google’s spam systems are built to find.

There is also a question of return. In Ahrefs’ study of one million keywords, published in January 2025, the correlation between links and rankings was weaker for commercial and transactional searches than for informational ones. That fits the view that other signals carry more of those results. It does not mean commercial pages need no links. It means a link is a smaller part of the answer there.

The middleman method

The standard model has three steps.

1. Publish something that people link to: original data, a calculator, a thorough guide.
2. Earn or place links to that asset. As a rule of thumb, editors accept a link to a useful resource more readily than a link to a sales page.
3. Link from the asset to the commercial page inside the body text.

The asset collects the links. The internal link passes the benefit on. You can also use the keyword as the anchor on the internal link, where the risk is far lower than on an external one. The anchor text lesson explains why.

For this to work, the site structure has to help:

• Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
• Fix orphan pages, which have no internal links pointing at them.
• Do not send links through chains of redirects.
• Find 404 pages that still hold backlinks and redirect each one to the closest live equivalent.

The last point is often the cheapest link work you can do, because the editorial decision was made years ago and only the address is broken.

A starting split

When you plan a quarter of placements, you need a default. A common one among practitioners is:

Target	Share of new links
Homepage and brand pages	40% to 60%
Informational assets	20% to 30%
Commercial pages	20% to 30%

This is convention, not a figure from Google or from a study. Adjust it to the profiles of the sites that rank in your market. If their commercial pages hold a larger share, yours may need to as well, and a link gap analysis at page level will show it.

When a commercial page does need direct links

Add direct links when the pages ranking for your keyword have clearly more referring domains than your page, and internal links have not closed the difference. Then follow three rules.

Match intent. A comparison or review article can link to a commercial page naturally. An informational article should link to a guide.

Check the page is fit. Never point a link at a page that is noindexed, redirected, thin or about to be migrated.

Limit keyword anchors. Set a cap on exact-match anchors for each commercial page and require approval for any commercial anchor. Your link buying policy is the place to write those limits down.

What to track

Report the share of links going to commercial against informational pages each quarter, alongside the anchor mix. If the commercial share climbs well above what competitors show, slow down and move budget to assets and the homepage.

Where to go next

Choose the target for each placement in how to write a placement brief. To see how links pass value in the first place, read how search engines evaluate links. For online shops, see ecommerce link building.