Guide · Season
Getting your site ready for Black Friday
A seasonal peak is prepared weeks before the first visitor: the time it takes a search engine to read the offer page, understand it and file it away. This guide covers, in order, what to check on the page being served — title, canonical, indexing directives, sitemap, announcement, speed, structured data — and what to plan for the day after the offer. Each rule links to the official documentation it is based on.
01
A stable address for the event
A /black-friday page, reused from one year to the next, keeps the links it has received and the history search engines know it by. A dated page (/black-friday-2026) starts from scratch with each edition, and the old one ends up as a redirect or an orphan page.
Why: That is the choice made here: seorecords.com/black-friday serves the 2026 edition and will serve the next one. After the offer, the page stays online and states that the edition is closed.
02
A title and a description that name the offer
The title states the event, the size of the discount and what it covers; the description adds the dates. Keep within the limits in every language served: 30 to 60 characters for the title, 110 to 155 for the description.
Why: Google writes the displayed title from your title tag, among other sources, and may draw the snippet from the meta description: an offer named right on the results page is read before the click.
03
Temporary pages kept out of the index
Order confirmation page, sorting or filter variants, test page: set the noindex directive, and leave these pages open to crawling in robots.txt — the search engine must be able to read the directive in order to apply it.
Why: Google's documentation makes it clear: a page blocked by robots.txt keeps its noindex directive invisible, and its address can still appear in results.
04
One canonical per piece of content
When the same offer exists under several addresses (campaign parameters, sorting, pagination of a promotional listing), each variant designates the main page with rel="canonical", and that page designates itself.
Why: Google reads the canonical as a strong signal, alongside redirects and the sitemap: signals that say the same thing designate the same page.
05
An up-to-date sitemap, with accurate dates
The offer page enters the sitemap as soon as it goes live, with a modification date that changes when its text changes — and only then.
Why: Google uses lastmod when that date is consistently accurate, and ignores priority and changefreq. An accurate date is one the search engine believes.
06
IndexNow when the sale opens and when it closes
Announce the offer's address when it goes live, then again when its nature changes at the end of the offer. Bing and the other engines in the protocol then come back to re-read the page at the right moment.
Why: One announcement per genuine change: that is what makes the announcement credible. Google discovers your changes at its own pace — hence the preceding rule, which serves every engine.
07
A fast page, measured in its festive form
Banner, countdown, seasonal visuals: measure the page as it will be served during the offer. The published Core Web Vitals thresholds are an LCP of 2.5 s or less, an INP of 200 ms or less and a CLS of 0.1 or less, read at the 75th percentile of visits.
Why: A banner added above the content pushes down everything that follows: reserve its space in the layout, and give every image its dimensions.
08
Offer data that states the displayed price
In Product markup, the offer carries price, priceCurrency and priceValidUntil, the offer's end date. Google also documents the struck-through price of merchant listings (priceType StrikethroughPrice).
Why: The marked-up price must be the one the page displays. And Google's documentation warns: a past priceValidUntil can remove the product snippet — the end date is kept up to date just like the price.
09
The struck-through price, in France: the lowest of the thirty days
Every price reduction announcement must display, as its reference price, the lowest price charged by the seller during the thirty days preceding the reduction (French Consumer Code, article L112-1-1, arising from European directive 2019/2161).
Why: Set the reference price before you write the page, and keep it stable over those thirty days: the struck-through price then becomes a verifiable fact.
The day after the offer
The end of a promotion is a change like any other, and it is published in the same way. The offer page keeps its address and states that the edition is closed; prices return to their usual level, in the text as in the markup; the sitemap takes the date of that change, and the IndexNow announcement goes out once the page is published. On a static site, plan for the offer's elements to switch themselves off at the appointed hour: that is what a small script does on our own page, until the next publication.
Check your offer page
The Checker reads your page exactly as it is served, free of charge, in about ten seconds: title, description, canonical, directives and structured data. The Audit SEO Records reads the entire site, page by page, before the traffic peak.
The sources
- Google Search Central — Influencing your title links in search results
- Google Search Central — Snippets and the meta description tag
- Google Search Central — Block indexing with noindex
- Google Search Central — Consolidate duplicate URLs (canonical)
- Google Search Central — Build and submit a sitemap
- IndexNow — protocol documentation
- web.dev — Core Web Vitals and their thresholds
- Google Search Central — Product structured data (snippets and merchant listings)
- Schema.org — priceValidUntil
- Légifrance — Consumer Code (article L112-1-1, price reduction announcements)
- EUR-Lex — Directive (EU) 2019/2161, known as the "Omnibus" directive