--- title: "Your Black Friday page should live forever: evergreen sale page SEO" description: "Use one permanent /black-friday page instead of a new URL every year. How to set it up, what to show off-season, and how to redirect old sale pages." url: https://dumbcmo.com/blog/evergreen-black-friday-page-seo category: "Getting found" tags: ["black friday", "seo", "ecommerce", "redirects", "structured data", "landing pages"] published: 2026-10-31 updated: 2026-10-31 reading_time: 10 min author: "The DumbCMO" --- # Your Black Friday page should live forever: evergreen sale page SEO > **TL;DR:** Make one Black Friday URL, like /black-friday, and keep it live all year. It builds links and gets found by Google early. Off-season, show the next sale and a signup instead of deleting it. Redirect old /black-friday-2024 pages to it with a single 301. [Notebook](https://dumbcmo.com) › [Blog](https://dumbcmo.com/blog) › Getting found › Your Black Friday page should live forever: evergreen sale page SEO Every November, lots of shops make a brand new page: /black-friday-2026. In December they delete it. Next year, /black-friday-2027. Each time, they start from zero in Google. No links, no history, nothing. There’s a simpler way. One page. Same address every year. It just keeps getting stronger. ## In normal-people words ## What “evergreen” means here An evergreen (Content that stays useful and live all year, or for years, instead of disappearing after one moment.) Black Friday page is a single address, like yoursite.com/black-friday, that you never delete. In November it shows your sale. The rest of the year it says “our next Black Friday sale is coming, sign up to hear first.” The address stays the same. Only the content changes. ## Why one permanent URL wins **Links keep counting.** When a blog, a deals site or a newsletter links to your Black Friday page, that link helps it rank. If you delete the page in December, the link points at nothing. With one permanent page, every year’s links add up. **Google already knows it.** Google needs time to find and index a page. A brand new page in mid-November is racing the clock. A page that’s been live for years is already there. **Google recommends it.** In a 2020 post on Black Friday pages, Google’s Search Central team suggested using a recurring URL, such as /sale/black-friday rather than /sale/2020/black-friday. Google’s John Mueller made the same point back in 2018: taking seasonal pages down and putting them back up makes it harder for Google to understand them, and one URL collects links over a longer time. > **The DumbCMO:** Deleting your Black Friday page every December is like closing your shop’s front door every January and building a new one next November. In a different place. ## The chai stall version A chai stall at the same corner for 10 years doesn’t need a sign telling people where it is. Everyone knows. A stall that moves every winter has to start again. New regulars, new word of mouth, new everything. **Your Black Friday page is the corner.** Stay put. ## Setting it up **One page, every year** 1. **Pick a plain address.** yoursite.com/black-friday or yoursite.com/sale/black-friday. No year in it. Ever. 2. **Put it live early.** Weeks before the sale, not the night before. Google’s advice is to create the page early so it has time to be found and indexed. 3. **Don’t block it.** No “noindex”, no password, no robots.txt block while you build it. If Google can’t crawl it, it can’t list it. 4. **Link to it from your home page.** A link from your home page tells Google, and people, that this page matters. Google suggested exactly this for sale pages. 5. **Ask Google to look again.** After a big update, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to request indexing. ## What to show off-season This is where most people go wrong. In December, the sale ends and they panic: delete it? Hide it? Redirect it to the home page? None of those. Keep the page live and useful: - **Say the sale is over, nicely.** “Black Friday 2026 has ended. Thank you!” - **Say when the next one is,** roughly. “Our next Black Friday sale is in November.” - **Add a signup.** Email or WhatsApp: “Get the deal before everyone else.” This turns a dead page into a list builder all year. - **Link to what’s for sale now.** Bestsellers, a current offer, your main categories. - **Keep a little history.** A short line on what last year’s sale included helps people know what to expect. **What to do with the page after the sale** - **If** You want to delete it **→ then** Don’t. You lose the links and the history. The page would return a 404 and drop out of Google. - **If** You want to add “noindex” so it’s hidden **→ then** Don’t. Google drops it, and you start again next year. - **If** You want to redirect it to the home page **→ then** Avoid it. You lose the page people, and Google, expect at that address. - **If** You want to keep it live with next-sale info and a signup **→ then** Yes. That’s the whole idea. ## When to update it - **Late October or early November:** switch it from “coming soon” to a proper preview. What’s on sale, when it starts, signup for early access. - **Sale day:** switch on the real offers and prices. - **The day after the sale ends:** switch to “thanks, next year” mode. Don’t leave expired prices up. - **The rest of the year:** look at it once every few months. Update the year in the text, check links still work. Don’t chop and change it daily for unrelated promotions, though. Google’s 2018 advice was not to keep switching one page’s theme back and forth. If you want a Diwali or end-of-season sale page, give that its own permanent address too, like /diwali-sale. ## Internal links: tell Google this page matters Internal links (Links from one page on your website to another page on your website.) help Google find a page and understand how important it is. - **Home page:** a banner or link to /black-friday during the season. A small footer link the rest of the year is fine. - **Navigation:** add it to the menu in November. - **Product and category pages:** “This is in our Black Friday sale” linking back to the page. - **Blog posts and emails:** always link to the same /black-friday address, never a one-off version. ## Title and meta description The title is the blue link people see in Google. The meta description (The short summary under your page’s link in Google results. Google sometimes writes its own instead.) is the grey text under it. **Title ideas by season** | When | Title idea | | --- | --- | | Off-season | Black Friday Sale at [Shop name]: sign up for early access | | Sale week | Black Friday Sale 2026: 25% off everything – [Shop name] | | Avoid | BLACK FRIDAY!!! BEST DEALS!!! CHEAPEST PRICES!!! | Putting the year in the *title* during sale season is fine. It tells shoppers the deal is current. Just keep the year out of the *URL*. And update the title and description when you change the page, so Google doesn’t show last year’s offer. ## Structured data: careful here Structured data (Extra code on a page that describes it to search engines in a fixed format, like “this is a product, this is the price”.) can help Google show extra details for your products. For a Black Friday page, a few cautions from Google’s own guidelines: - **A sale isn’t an event.** Google’s event markup rules say not to mark up non-events as events, and specifically not to use it for short-term discounts or purchase opportunities, like “50% off until Saturday”. - **Only mark up what’s on the page.** Google says markup must describe content people can actually see. No hidden prices. - **Keep it current.** Google’s guidelines say it won’t show rich results for time-sensitive content that’s no longer relevant. Expired sale prices in your product markup are a problem. - **Breaking the rules has a cost.** Google can take a manual action that removes your rich results. Its guidelines say this doesn’t affect ranking, but you lose the extras. For most small shops: let your shop platform handle product markup on product pages. Don’t hand-write special “sale” markup for the Black Friday page. ## Already have /black-friday-2024? Redirect it If you’ve made yearly pages before, don’t just leave them or delete them. Point them at the new permanent page. 301 (A permanent redirect. It sends people and search engines from an old address to a new one, and tells Google the new one is the real page now.) redirect each old page straight to /black-friday. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects (a 301 or 308) when you move a page, and treats the target as the page to show in search. **Cleaning up old sale pages** 1. **List them.** Search your site and Google Search Console for every old sale page: /black-friday-2023, /bf-sale-2024, /blackfriday2025, all of them. 2. **Redirect each one straight to the new page.** One hop. Old page → /black-friday. Your shop platform or hosting usually has a redirects setting. 3. **Fix redirect chains.** If /black-friday-2023 already redirects to /black-friday-2024, change it to go straight to /black-friday. 4. **Update your own links.** Change menu, footer, email and blog links to point directly at /black-friday. 5. **Test it.** Open each old address in your browser. You should land on /black-friday in one go. ### Why chains are bad A redirect chain (When one redirect leads to another redirect, then another, before reaching the real page.) is 2023 → 2024 → 2025 → the real page. Each hop slows people down. Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops, but there’s no reason to make them. One hop is cleanest. ## Do this today - [ ] Check if you already have a Black Friday page, and what its address is. - [ ] If it has a year in the address, plan a new permanent one: /black-friday. - [ ] Put the page live now, even as “coming soon” with a signup. - [ ] Link to it from your home page. - [ ] Make sure it isn’t set to noindex or blocked. - [ ] Find any old yearly sale pages and redirect each straight to the new page. - [ ] Put a reminder in your calendar for the day after the sale ends: switch to next-year mode. ## Not-so-frequently asked questions ### Is it too late to do this for 2026? No. Getting it live now is better than the night before. And whatever you build now carries over to every future year. ### Should I use /black-friday or /sale/black-friday? Either works. Pick one and never change it. ### Can I use the same page for Cyber Monday? Yes, most small shops should. One page for the whole Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend is simpler. Just mention both in the text. ### My shop platform makes collection pages, not landing pages. Is that OK? Yes. A permanent collection at /collections/black-friday works the same way. Same address, never deleted. ### Will this get me to the top of Google for “Black Friday”? No, and anyone promising that is selling something. See [guaranteed first page](/scam-watch#guaranteed-first-page). It helps you show up for searches like “[your shop] Black Friday” and your product type plus Black Friday. ### What if I don’t run a sale every year? Keep the page live anyway, saying no sale this year, with a link to current offers and a signup. You keep the links for next time. ## Things your agency won’t say - Rebuilding the sale page from scratch every year is easy billable work. A permanent page you update in an hour isn’t. - The off-season version of the page matters as much as the sale version. That’s where your next year’s email list comes from. ## Jargon Jail **Locked up: “404”** What a website says when a page doesn’t exist. Delete your Black Friday page and anyone following an old link, including Google, **gets a dead end instead of your shop.** Google eventually drops it from search. Next year you start again. ## Where to go next - The full Black Friday plan, week by week: [The Black Friday 2026 countdown checklist](/blog/black-friday-checklist-2026) - Sending ads to this page: [The Black Friday ads survival guide](/blog/black-friday-ads-survival-guide) - How SEO works in general: [What is SEO?](/blog/what-is-seo) and [How long does SEO take?](/blog/how-long-does-seo-take) - Everything on getting found: [SEO, dumbed down](/seo) ## Sources 1. Google Search Central Blog, [“Best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages”](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/10/best-practices-black-friday), 26 October 2020: create sale pages early, don’t block crawling, use a recurring URL without the year, link from the home page, ask Google to recrawl. 2. Search Engine Journal, [“Google Recommends Using One URL for All Seasonal Content”](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-recommends-using-one-url-for-all-seasonal-content/280445/), 28 November 2018: John Mueller on keeping one URL for seasonal content and not switching a page’s theme back and forth. 3. Google Search Central, [“Redirects and Google Search”](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects): permanent server-side redirects recommended for moved pages, and the redirect target treated as canonical. 4. Google Crawling Infrastructure, [“How HTTP status codes affect Google’s crawlers”](https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/troubleshooting/http-status-codes): Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops. 5. Google Search Central, [“Learn about Google event schema markup”](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/event): don’t mark up non-events, short-term discounts or purchase opportunities as events. 6. Google Search Central, [“General structured data guidelines”](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies): mark up only visible content, keep time-sensitive information current, and how manual actions affect rich results. ## Related notes - [Bing’s Topics Portfolio: see which subjects get you cited in AI answers](https://dumbcmo.com/blog/bing-topics-portfolio-ai-performance): Bing added a beta Topics Portfolio tab to the AI Performance report. It groups the queries where Copilot and Bing’s AI answers cite you into topics, shows how big and crowded each topic is, and lists queries where rivals get cited and you don’t. Free, rough, Bing-only. Use it as a to-do list. - [Google rankings shook on 24 October. Should you do anything?](https://dumbcmo.com/blog/google-ranking-shake-october-24): Many rank trackers spiked on Saturday 24 October 2026, which suggests Google changed something. Google hasn't confirmed it. Wait a week, check Search Console, and change nothing in a panic. - [Google’s AI summary now shows on over 80% of searches](https://dumbcmo.com/blog/ai-overviews-on-80-percent-of-searches): Tracking tools now put Google’s AI summary on 80%+ of searches, up from about half in mid-2025. Your clicks may keep falling. Your job is to be the business the summary mentions. --- From [DumbCMO](https://dumbcmo.com): The marketing notes you were too embarrassed to take.