Google in a statement recently advised sellers and e-commerce giants to use permanent URLs for black Friday rather than getting into the creation of a new URL every for the massive sale.
This recommendation from Google came in a set of “best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages”. This also had five more points Google mentioned in its set of recommendations.
Google explained the benefits of using a single URL for every annual season’s Black Friday sale.
Google explains how Recurring URL for Black Friday Pages will Help:
The shopping season starts a day after Thanksgiving day every year — this holiday shopping season is also called — Black Friday. Hundreds and thousands of retailers start the sale with deep exciting discounts to lure customers.
For retailers, this holiday shopping season brings new sales every year.
Every year retailers get indulged in the preparation for the Black Friday massive sale much in advance. The newness is fine — but Google says what should not be done is the creation of new pages every season.
Since the Black Friday Sales are short-lived, most site owners get into the idea of creating new pages for Black Friday sales every year and removing them after the sale ends. But, this according to Google is not a great idea.
Here’s what Google says “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).”
What is the Reason for Google recommending Recurring URLs’?
Google recommends recurring URLs because they help sites with building link equity. So, you’ll then ask what is link equity. Read below:
Link equity: Link equity which is also known as link juice is a term used to describe — how one link can pass authority from page to the other. Both external links & internal links can pass authority to other webpages.
For any website, the top most SEO priority is to link equity & the value that each page passes over to other web pages. Page rank in a way is linked to link equity even when there are several other factors that determine page rank today.
How can you Avoid Losing Link equity?
While there are other ways, you can avoid losing link equity by — finding broken links & fixing the old URLs — one quite effective way is to avoid multiple versions of the site or the pages.
Creating different versions of the same page or the site multiple times is one of the silliest SEO mistakes most marketers do.
When the external & the internal links of the same page are created to different versions, the strength of the primary URL gets diminished. This further affects the webpage ranking for keywords.
Why Google Talks about creating recurring versions of the Black Friday Sale pages?
So, with that reference to how you can avoid losing Link equity, Google recommends using the same page for the annual Black Friday sale every year.
When you do it another way around, the SEO value (that you have acquired over a long period of time & a huge investment) of the link gets diminished.
When other different pages get linked to a particular URL, its link equity is built. And, the URL will build the potential to gain link equity, if it exists on the web for a longer period of time.
And, the more link equity a URL has, the better it has chances to rank on the SERP.
A URL that has existed for a longer period of time with moderate link equity will have better chances of ranking than a newly built URL which has no equity at all.
This is why Google recommends using the same URL for the Black Friday sale pages every year instead of creating new pages.
While Google suggested not to use multiple pages for Black Pages, it came up with a few more best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for marketers & retailers.
Publish early
Google says you must also publish it as early as possible. Make sure that you have updated and published your page much before Black Friday so that the Google bot gets time to discover & get it indexed.
Follow SEO standard Practices
Make sure every aspect of your sales page is up-to-date in line with the SEO standard practices & avoid making silly SEO mistakes.
Make sure there are enough internal links to your landing page
Make sure that other pages on the website are well-linked with your Black Friday Landing Page. This step will help Google know about the significance of your landing page and will also help visitors reach your sales page easily.
Use Only high quality & relevant Images
Include a static image that contains the complete representation of your sale. Make sure every image you use is engaging and interesting. Trim the white ends of the images you are using.
Get your landing page Recrawled
Let Google recrawl your page once you have updated it with fresh content and new data. This will update your content faster.
Takeaways.
Google recommends retailers must not create new pages for the upcoming Black Friday sale. It is advantageous on their part to create a single page for the Black Friday sale, which they can update & get recrawled every time it is updated.
Creating multiple pages will only lose link equity, diminishing the strength of the landing page. You must avoid multiple versions of the site or the pages if you want to build link equity & the strength of your primary URL.
Google suggests publishing early, using high-quality images, following standard SEO practices, including enough internal links & getting your landing page recrawled. And, overall creating recurring Black Friday sales pages.