A fixed URL for Black Friday

Black Friday is becoming more popular every year, including in the Netherlands. Large online stores such as Coolblue have been taking advantage of this for years. If you always create a new URL for your annual Black Friday promotions, you'd better do it on a fixed page. Here are the reasons why.

Black Friday is an American item that has blown over to the Netherlands, with a focus on heavy discount actions with an on = off mentality. They are always quick deals that quickly disappear again. Over the past years Black Friday and Cyber Monday have increased in popularity and therefore people and visitors expect to score a deal at your web store.

In this blog post we will look at some technical issues that come up in an annual promotion. Namely, the place for your landing page and the additional SEO involved.

Fixed URL or annual URL that is removed after the promotions?

The question with this type of action is whether you need to create a temporary page for this and remove it again after the action. Deleting or indexing pages from Google is not the best way to handle this. A page does not get enough authority in a short lifespan than a page that persists for a longer time. So a permanent page has a better chance of ranking organically within the search engines and generally has more authority than a temporary page that only has a chance to rank with ads.

URLs have a greater chance of ranking as soon as you link to them externally on the website itself. It is therefore important that instead of a temporary URL such as actions/2020/black-Friday, you turn it into a permanent URL such as actions/black-Friday. And adjust this on an annual basis to the temporary actions.

Further tips and tricks for a better Black Friday or Cyber Monday landing page

There are a number of tips and tricks besides the permanent page that you can apply for a better landing page for annual or temporary actions. These can be divided into the following points that can be applied.

Publishing a landing page early

Publishing a landing page early is important so that the various crawlers have more time to do their work. Especially since manually entering URLS is temporarily blocked in Google Search Console you need to have it online far in advance. So that the crawlers of the search engines can index the page.

Optimize the landing page

Take into account the main rules for SEO in the page. So use a clear readable Title, optimize the content, use the right H tags and metadata and take into account the length of the content. With a permanent page for such actions you need to ensure that the page becomes a full-fledged asset to your website. And you can therefore put more work into it than a temporary page that you later remove anyway.

Build internal links to the landing page

Building internal links to the landing page is necessary for it to be indexed correctly by search engines. With internal links the landing page gets more authority and is recognized as a full page within thehosting. And thus it gets more recognition and a better position.

On relevant existing pages, the landing page can then be linked so that the page is better indexed.

Create a relevant and high quality image for the promotion

To draw attention to the page itself, a good image is needed, not only to attract attention on the website itself but also to advertise on social media. An image can be created in-house or outsourced to an advertising agency. This is to generate more success and engagement on Social Media and other sources.

Google recommends removing white space from the image and following the standard rules. So grab the right size for your website. Regularly 1204 by 904. And make sure it scales to the different social media platforms.

Crawl the page when it's changed

When you make changes to the page it is also important that the page is crawled again by the search engines. This is normally done by manually requesting the page to be crawled again via Search Console. However, this is (hopefully) temporarily disabled, so change the sitemap.xml when you make a change to it and submit your sitemap.xml again within Google Search Console to have the landing page crawled again.

Action from MijnHostingPartner.nl with Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Of course we are also busy with a nice action for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Keep an eye on our blog posts and our social media to stay informed!

Inspiration for this blog post: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-recommends-permanent-urls-for-black-friday-pages/386384/