Black Friday page: why the URL stays the same every year

What Google recommends for sale pages

In October 2020, Google published recommendations for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages on the Search Central Blog: create the page well before the sale so that Googlebot has time to discover and index it (Google Search Central); link to it from the home page; and use a recurring URL rather than a new address for each occurrence of the event (Google Search Central). The example given: /sale/black-friday, not /sale/2020/black-friday (Google Search Central).

Use a recurring URL, not a new URL for each occurrence of the event.

— Google Search Central Blog, "Best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages", 26 October 2020

In July 2021, Google revisited the list in an article about deal pages. Among the previous year's recommendations it lists, verbatim, "Reuse the same URL each year" (Google Search Central) and "Create your pages early so that Google can index them" (Google Search Central). New was the advice to create a dedicated page for every promotional event, not only Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and to include the event description in the page title, such as "Black Friday 2021 Deals" (Google Search Central).

The underlying idea: a sale page that returns every year is not a campaign page with an expiry date but a permanent page with changing content, more like a category than a press release.

Why a year in the address gives away links

Over the years, a Black Friday page collects links: from newsletters, partner sites, price comparison sites, voucher portals and social media. Google consolidates signals such as these links into one preferred address when several addresses carry the same or very similar content (Google Search Central). That only works as long as the address is alive or cleanly redirected.

With a year in the path, a new page is created every year and starts from zero, while the previous year's address often leads nowhere after the sale. For Google, the case is clear: addresses that return a status code in the 4xx range are not indexed, and already indexed addresses that return a 4xx response are removed from the index (Google Search Central). Links pointing to /black-friday-2025/ then end on an error page, and the page for 2026 has to earn its visibility from scratch.

Then there is time. Google puts the time it takes to crawl new or changed pages at anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and points out that requesting a recrawl does not ensure inclusion in search results (Google Search Central). An address that Google has known for years, by contrast, does not have to be discovered first; its update only has to be picked up.

Demand justifies the effort. For Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, the HDE forecast sales of 5.8 billion euros in Germany (HDE). In the accompanying survey by IFH Köln of more than 1,000 online shoppers, 48 percent of respondents said they intended to go bargain hunting on Black Friday 2025 (HDE). Anyone who wants to be found through search during those days needs a page that is indexed when sale week begins.

The year belongs in the title, not in the path

The year still has its place. Google advises including the event description in the page title, because the title is often incorporated into the text shown in the deals carousel (Google Search Central). For searchers, too, "Black Friday 2026" in the title shows that the page is current. The path, on the other hand, is an identifier, not a headline.

In practice this means: title, heading, description, images and offers change every year. The address, the canonical tag and the page's place in the site structure stay the same. The overview separates the two.

One pitfall lies in the shop system. Some systems generate the address of a landing page or category from its name. Anyone who changes the name to "Black Friday 2026" every year should check whether this silently creates a new address. A fixed path that is separate from the displayed name is the safer option. The test is simple: change the name, save, open the address.

Online early: the schedule up to the end of November

As early as 2020, Google recommended creating the page well before the sale and making sure Google is not blocked from crawling the URL (Google Search Central). For a permanent address, "create" usually means "update": the page already exists, it gets new content and is linked prominently again.

If you only want to reveal the deals on the day of the sale, you do not have to wait until then. Google advises putting general information about the event on the page in advance so that its relevance is clear, and requesting a recrawl after the update (Google Search Central). A sensible sequence for an existing address:

1. Mid-October: switch the content to the new year, add the year to title and description, add general information on period and conditions.
2. At the same time: check status code 200, no noindex, no block in robots.txt, self-referencing canonical, sitemap entry with a current lastmod, then request a recrawl.
3. End of October: add links from the home page and navigation, point newsletter templates and ad material to the permanent address.
4. During sale week: add the deals, request a recrawl after major changes, monitor at short intervals.
5. After the sale: keep the page, add a note that the sale has ended, remove the prominent links.

Recrawls cannot be requested as often as you like: there is a quota for individual URLs, and repeated requests for the same URL do not get it crawled any faster (Google Search Central). The load during sale week needs a plan of its own, described in the article on Q4 traffic peaks.

Between sales events: out of the navigation, not out of the index

After the sale, three options seem obvious: delete the page, set it to noindex or block it in robots.txt. Each of them can cost time next year, each for a different reason.

A 404 or 410 removes the address from the index (Google Search Central). The HTTP standard even names status code 410 explicitly as common for limited-time promotional services (RFC 9110). For a one-off event that fits, for a recurring one it does not: the address is meant to be found again next year, together with the links it has collected until then.

A noindex only takes effect when Googlebot fetches the page again, and depending on the importance of the page it may take months for Google to revisit it (Google Search Central). If you set the page to noindex in January and release it again in October, you therefore depend on Googlebot's next visit. A block in robots.txt does not help either: the crawler sees neither a noindex nor new content, and the address can still appear in results, for example if other pages link to it (Google Search Central).

The seemingly harmless solution has a catch as well: an empty page with the sentence "This sale has ended". If a page returns status 200 but its content suggests an error, an empty page or an error message, Search Console shows a soft 404 (Google Search Central). The page therefore needs real content between sales events too; more on this in the article on soft 404s and wrong status codes.

With redirects, the type matters: a permanent redirect leads Google to show the target in search results, a temporary one keeps the source page in the results (Google Search Central). For a sale address that is meant to return, a permanent redirect to the home page therefore points in the wrong direction.

The better way is unspectacular: the page stays reachable and indexable, disappears from the main navigation and the home page, and remains linked from a sales or footer area so that it does not become an orphan.

Consolidating old year addresses with a 301

Anyone who has worked with years so far usually owns several old addresses such as /black-friday-2024/. They carry exactly the links that the permanent page lacks, and the way to get them there is a permanent redirect. According to the HTTP standard, status code 301 means that the resource has been assigned a new permanent address and future references should use it (RFC 9110). Google treats a 301 redirect as a strong signal that the target should be processed (Google Search Central) and lists redirects first among the methods in its canonicalization documentation, ordered by how strongly they influence the result (Google Search Central).

It is important to send every old address directly to the target. Google will follow a chain from 2023 via 2024 to the permanent address: by default, Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops (Google Search Central). But every hop costs loading time, and every additional rule can break during the next rebuild. How such chains form is covered in the article on redirect chains; individual old addresses can be traced hop by hop with the free redirect checker.

# Old year addresses straight to the permanent page, no intermediate hop
location = /black-friday-2023/ { return 301 /black-friday/; }
location = /black-friday-2024/ { return 301 /black-friday/; }
location = /black-friday-2025/ { return 301 /black-friday/; }

# the same addresses without a trailing slash
location = /black-friday-2023 { return 301 /black-friday/; }
location = /black-friday-2024 { return 301 /black-friday/; }
location = /black-friday-2025 { return 301 /black-friday/; }

How long should the redirects stay in place? For site moves with changed addresses, Google recommends keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least one year (Google Search Central). This timeframe allows Google to transfer all signals to the new addresses, including links from other websites (Google Search Central). From the users' perspective, Google even suggests keeping redirects indefinitely. For sale addresses there is little reason not to: old newsletters and price comparison sites can point to the old address for a long time.

Redirects come with cleaning up your own links. Because redirects are slow for users, Google recommends updating your own links and high-volume links from other websites to point to the new addresses (Google Search Central). Internal links, banners, sitemap entries and canonical tags should therefore point directly to /black-friday/.

Sitemap, canonical tag and internal links

The permanent address belongs in the XML sitemap all year round. Google treats inclusion in the sitemap as a weak signal for which address should become canonical (Google Search Central). Together with a redirect and a canonical tag, the signals reinforce each other: according to Google, the methods can stack and become more effective when combined (Google Search Central).

As for the modification date: Google uses the lastmod value if it is consistently and verifiably accurate, and ignores the priority and change frequency values (Google Search Central). The lastmod value therefore gets the date of the October switch rather than changing with every small edit. More on this in the article on sitemap monitoring.

The canonical tag points to the page itself, without a year and without campaign parameters. During sale week in particular, many variants of the same address appear with parameters from newsletters and ads. Without a canonical tag of your own, Google decides itself which version appears in search results (Google Search Central). What happens when the wrong one wins is shown in the article on canonical tag errors.

That leaves the home page: Google advises linking to sale pages from the home page or a similarly important page so that users and Google find them more quickly (Google Search Central). Between sales events, a link from a sales overview or the footer is enough.

One address per occasion: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Black Week

The 2020 recommendations included dedicated pages for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (Google Search Central). Every recurring occasion therefore gets its own permanent address, such as /black-friday/, /cyber-monday/ or /black-week/. If you run the sale over several days, decide once which address is the main page. Switching every year between "Black Friday" and "Black Week" as the main address causes the same losses as a year in the path.

The dates themselves move too: Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall on a different date every year, which can distort reports on sale week; see the article on year-over-year comparisons in Q4. Imitators are in season at the same time; how retailers detect them early is covered in the article on fake shops in the holiday season.

When the address has to move after all

Sometimes a move cannot be avoided, for example when switching shop systems. Then the same applies as for any address change: a permanent redirect, updated internal links, an updated sitemap. Google describes permanent redirects as the right choice when you are sure the redirect will not be reverted (Google Search Central). Anyone who plans the new address for one season only is already planning the next chain.

A relaunch often brings other errors too: a noindex from the staging environment, a blocked robots.txt, a forgotten redirect. How that costs rankings unnoticed is described in the article on noindex in a deploy. For the Black Friday page, a relaunch in October or November is therefore particularly unfavourable timing.

Monitoring the permanent address

A permanent address is only worth as much as its condition on the day customers arrive. Between two sales events, updates, rebuilds and new server rules can hit the page without anyone opening it. XICTRAQ checks such an address from the outside and on a fixed schedule:

The screenshot changelog also shows when the page changed visibly, for example when last year's content reappears after an update. XICTRAQ cannot see the index status at Google itself from the outside; Search Console shows that. How the checks come together in the dashboard is shown in the live demo.

Checklist for the Black Friday address

• A permanent address without a year, one per occasion, separate from the displayed name.
• Redirect old year addresses with a 301 directly to the permanent address.
• Update internal links, banners, newsletter templates and ad material.
• From mid-October, renew title, description and content, set lastmod, request a recrawl.
• Status code 200, no noindex, no block in robots.txt, self-referencing canonical.
• After the sale: keep the page, add a note and content, remove the prominent links.
• Monitor all year: status code, robots directive, canonical, sitemap, dead internal links.