Google Recommends Permanent URLs for Black Friday Pages
Google recommends using permanent URLs for Black Friday pages rather than creating new URLs for each annual sale.
Google shared this advice in a set of best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages, along with five additional recommendations.
Here’s more on the benefits of using recurring URLs, and a rundown of Google’s other advice for the upcoming shopping event.
Recurring URLs for Black Friday Pages
The holiday shopping season kicks off every year on the day after Thanksgiving – also known as Black Friday – with deep discounts from thousands of retailers.
Each year brings new sales, but it should not bring new sales pages.
The ephemeral nature of Black Friday sales may lead some site owners to believe setting up new pages each year, and later removing them, is the best course of action.
However, that’s not ideal for Black Friday pages, or any web pages for that matter.
Here’s specifically what Google recommends:
“Use a recurring URL, not a new URL for each occurrence of the event. Give the landing page of recurring events a meaningful URL that reflects the event that is used each year (for example: use /sale/black-friday, not /sale/2020/black-friday).”
Why does Google recommend recurring URLs?
Because recurring URLs allow sites to build link equity.
Link equity refers to the SEO value of a link, which is something that’s gained over time.
URLs build link equity when other pages link to them.
The longer a URL exists on the web, the more link equity it has the potential to gain.
And the more link equity a page has, the greater its potential to rank in search results.
An older URL with a moderate amount of link equity has a much greater chance to rank over a newly published page with no link equity.
So, instead of creating new pages for Black Friday every year, keep using the same URL as Google suggests.
Additional Recommendations For Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Here are the remainder of Google’s best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
These are recommendations for retailers to help Google highlight and surface sales events in search results.
- Publish early: Create the Black Friday sales page well before the sale so Googlebot has time to discover and index it.
- Follow standard SEO best practices: For up-to-date information on what matters in SEO today, see Search Engine Journal’s complete guide to SEO here.
- Build internal links to the landing page: Link to the Black Friday landing page from other pages on the website, especially the home page. This will help communicate its importance to Google, and help visitors find the page faster.
- Include a relevant, high quality image: Provide a static image with an up-to-date representation of your sale. Google recommends trimming whitespace around the borders of the image, and ensuring the image is visually engaging and of good quality.
- Get the landing page recrawled: When the landing page has been updated with new or additional content, ask Google to recrawl the page to get your content updated more quickly.
Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog
