Key Takeaways
- SEO prep for BFCM should start 6–8 weeks before the event, not the week before
- Broken links on high-traffic pages are especially damaging when traffic is at its peak
- Temporary sale pages should use permanent URLs (not
/collections/black-friday-2025) if you plan to use them next year - Post-BFCM cleanup is as important as pre-BFCM prep
Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the highest-traffic period of the year for most Shopify stores. For many merchants, these few days account for 15–25% of annual revenue. The SEO decisions you make (and don’t make) in the weeks before can meaningfully affect how much of that traffic you capture.
The SEO mistakes that cost merchants traffic on BFCM aren’t usually sophisticated — they’re the predictable, fixable issues that accumulated over the year and then get exposed when a store’s traffic spikes. Broken links are at the top of that list.
Here’s a timeline-based preparation guide for Shopify SEO heading into peak season.
8 Weeks Before: Establish Your Baseline
Run a Full Broken Link Audit
This is the most important step, and it needs to happen early so you have time to fix everything before the traffic arrives.
Run a comprehensive broken link scan across your products, pages, and blog posts. The goal: a clean slate going into peak season. Every broken link you fix now is one less crawl slot wasted, one less authority leak, one less potential customer frustration during your highest-traffic period.
Pay particular attention to:
- Your homepage and main navigation (most visible, highest authority)
- Your top-revenue collection pages (most important for category rankings)
- Your highest-traffic blog posts (best internal link assets)
- Any sale pages or landing pages from previous years
Audit Your Existing Sale Pages
If you’ve run BFCM sales before, you may have:
- Old sale collection pages (
/collections/black-friday-deals) that are currently empty or deleted - Blog posts from previous years that link to now-deleted promotional products
- Homepage banners from last year that pointed to URLs that no longer exist
These old promotional assets often create broken links that persist year-round. Clean them up now.
Better practice for sale URLs: Instead of creating /collections/black-friday-2024, create /collections/black-friday that you reuse every year. This builds link equity and organic rankings for the URL over multiple years, rather than starting fresh each time with a year-specific URL.
Check Core Web Vitals
High-traffic periods expose performance issues that might be tolerable under normal load but break down under peak traffic. Check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console for any pages in “Needs Improvement” or “Poor” status.
For BFCM specifically, prioritize:
- Your homepage
- Your main sale/deals collection
- Your top product pages
Slow-loading pages on your highest-traffic days lose sales directly (conversion rate drops with every additional second of load time) and affect rankings going forward.
6 Weeks Before: Build Your BFCM SEO Assets
Create or Revive Your Sale Collection
If you’re using a persistent sale URL, now is when to start building its SEO:
- Write a descriptive collection description with relevant keywords (“Black Friday deals on [category]”)
- Add internal links from your blog and other collections to the sale page
- If it existed last year, verify the redirects from any old URLs are in place
- Submit it to GSC for indexing if it’s newly created
A sale page that starts accruing crawl attention 6 weeks before BFCM will be more firmly indexed and ranking than one created a week before the event.
Publish Supporting Blog Content
Blog posts about BFCM deals, gift guides, or buying guides in your category can capture pre-purchase traffic. People start searching for gift guides and deal previews weeks before BFCM itself.
Topics that work:
- “[Category] Gift Guide [Year]”
- “Best [Category] Deals for Black Friday”
- “What to Buy on Black Friday: [Category] Edition”
These posts should link to your sale collection and your most relevant product pages. Publish them early enough for Google to index and potentially rank them before traffic peaks.
Build Internal Links to Sale Pages
Your sale collection should receive internal links from high-authority pages on your store:
- A banner or featured section on your homepage
- Links from relevant collection descriptions
- Links from your highest-traffic blog posts (where the mention is natural)
The goal is to build the sale page’s authority before traffic arrives, not just create it and hope Google figures it out.
4 Weeks Before: Technical Review
Verify Your Sitemap is Current
Make sure your BFCM sale collection and any new landing pages are in your sitemap. Shopify’s sitemap auto-generates, but verify by visiting yourstore.com/sitemap.xml and checking that new pages are included. Resubmit to GSC.
Test Your Redirects
If you’ve set up redirects for old promotional URLs, test them. Visit the old URLs and verify they redirect correctly. Pay special attention to any redirects that went live after your last verification — redirect chains (where A→B→C) can form between now and your previous setup.
Run Another Broken Link Scan
You’ve been operating for six weeks since the first scan. New broken links may have appeared. Scan again and fix anything new that’s appeared. Going into BFCM with a clean store is worth the extra 15 minutes.
Check Mobile Performance
BFCM traffic is predominantly mobile. If your store has mobile usability issues — slow load times, broken layouts, checkout problems on mobile — BFCM will expose them at the worst possible time.
Test your full purchase flow on a phone: homepage → collection → product page → cart → checkout. Note anything that loads slowly, feels awkward, or breaks on mobile.
1–2 Weeks Before: Final Checks
Verify Your Sale Pages Are Live and Indexed
Check GSC’s URL Inspection tool on your main BFCM collection. Is it indexed? What date was it last crawled? If it hasn’t been crawled recently, request indexing.
Remove Any Under-Construction Content
Draft products, unpublished pages with partial content, or placeholder pages that might have been crawled should be verified as not accessible or not indexed. You don’t want Googlebot finding and indexing skeleton pages during peak season.
Confirm App Conflicts
Some BFCM-specific apps (countdown timers, sale badges, upsell popups) can slow page load significantly. Test your key pages after installing any new apps and compare PageSpeed scores before and after.
During BFCM: Monitor Actively
Watch Your GSC Real-Time Data
GSC doesn’t have truly real-time data, but you can see same-day data within hours. During BFCM:
- Monitor for any sudden spikes in 404 errors (may indicate a page that broke under load or a promotion that went live with a broken URL)
- Watch your homepage and sale collection’s ranking positions
Have a Fix Protocol Ready
If you discover a broken link on a key page during BFCM, you want to fix it in minutes, not hours. Know who has access to the Shopify admin and which tool you’ll use to find the source and apply the fix. The cost of a broken link on your sale page during peak hour is a quantified revenue impact.
After BFCM: Cleanup That Protects Next Year
Archive Sale Pages Correctly
If you’re removing sale-specific products and collections after the event:
- Set up redirects from sale products to their regular-price equivalents (don’t just delete)
- If your sale collection will return next year, consider keeping it (empty) rather than deleting it — preserves any link equity it built
- If you delete it, redirect the URL to your main deals or new arrivals collection
Audit for New Broken Links
BFCM often generates new broken links: promotional products deleted post-sale, temporary landing pages removed, blog posts that linked to sale items now pointing to redirected URLs. Run a scan in the first week of December to catch and fix these before they accumulate through the holiday season.
Document What Worked
Note which sale pages, blog posts, and landing pages drove the most organic traffic. These are the assets to protect, maintain, and build on for next year. Preserve their URLs, add redirects if they’re being modified, and plan to extend them for the next season rather than creating from scratch.
Clean your store’s broken links before peak season traffic arrives. Relink scans and fixes automatically. Install free on Shopify.