Learn · How-To

How to Build a Permanent Black Friday Deals Page

Most stores build a Black Friday page in November and delete it in December, so every year starts from zero. A permanent deals page stays at one address, is updated for each event and keeps whatever authority it earns. This guide shows how to set one up, how to handle offers that have ended, and when to start each year.

1. 1

   Choose one URL and keep it

   Pick a short, permanent address such as /black-friday/ and never put the year in it. Everything that points at the page, from links and shares to saved bookmarks, then keeps working from one year to the next. If you already have year-stamped pages from earlier events, leave them as they are for now and decide in a later step what should happen to them.

2. 2

   Build the page for both states

   Design the page so it works when a sale is live and when it is not. Live: current offers, prices, stock and end dates. Between events: a clear statement of when the next event is expected, how to get notified and where to find current everyday offers. A page that only makes sense for one week of the year is the reason most stores delete theirs.

3. 3

   Put every fact in plain text

   For each offer, state the product, the current price, the previous price if you show one, stock status and delivery timeframe in the page text, not only in images or scripts. This is what lets a search engine, an assistant or a shopper's agent read the page. Mark the offers up with Product and Offer schema once the text is right, following our guide on adding that markup.

4. 4

   Link to the page from where shoppers already are

   Add the deals page to your main navigation or footer for the whole year, and link to it from category pages whose products are on offer. Internal links are one of the ways a search engine works out which pages matter on a site, so a page linked from the homepage all year is more likely to be crawled and treated as important than one that appears briefly in a campaign banner.

5. 5

   Handle ended offers without breaking anything

   When an individual offer ends, remove it from the deals page and, if its product page still exists, let that page carry on at the regular price. If a product is gone for good with no replacement, let its address return a normal 404. Google's guidance is not to redirect missing pages to the homepage or to unrelated pages, because that creates soft 404s that confuse search engines. Redirect only where a genuine replacement exists.

6. 6

   Decide what to do with last year’s pages

   If you have old year-stamped Black Friday pages, redirect each one to the permanent page, which is a genuine replacement, and update any internal links that still point at the old address. Check them against your sitemap so that no ended campaign URL is still being submitted to search engines.

7. 7

   Keep a pre-season routine

   Put three dates in your calendar each year: start the deals page refresh early, publish the first teaser well before the event so there is time for it to be crawled, and review the page the week after the event. In South Africa the event has been stretching: Takealot's Black Friday-priced deals this year run from 26 October to 23 November, so waiting for the last week is already late.