The end of the year holiday season is a peak time for many merchants with special sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As a merchant, you can help Google highlight your sales events by providing landing pages with relevant content and high quality images.

Best Practices

The following are recommended best practices for your landing pages:

• Create the page early. Make sure you create the page well before the sale so Googlebot has time to discover and index the page. Make sure you are not blocking Google from crawling the URL (the Google URL Inspection Tool can be used to check this).
• Follow standard SEO best practices. A list of SEO best practices for landing pages can be found in our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.
• Link to the landing pages from your home page (or similar) to increase their prominence, helping users (and Google) find the landing page quicker.
• 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).
• Include a relevant, high quality image. Provide a static image with an up-to-date representation of your sale. Trim any whitespace around the borders of the image, and ensure that the image is visually engaging and is of good quality. For additional guidance on image quality, review the Google Images best practices and Images Web Fundamentals.
• Get your page recrawled. After you've tested your structured data for validity, ask Google to recrawl your page to get your content updated more quickly. (Note: as of publication this tool is undergoing maintenance, but we hope to have it up-and-running again soon.)

If you have any questions, let us know through the Help forum or on Twitter.

Posted by Alan Kent, Search Relations Team

In November 2019 we announced the Search Console Training YouTube series and started publishing videos regularly. The goal of the series was to create updated video content to be used alongside Search documentation, for example in the Help Center and in the Developers site.

The wonderful Google Developer Studio team (the engine behind those videos!) put together this fun blooper reel for the first wave of videos that we recorded in the Google London studio.

So far we’ve published twelve episodes in the series, each focusing on a different part of the tool. We’ve seen it’s helping lots of people to learn how to use Search Console - so we decided to continue recording videos… at home! Please bear with the trucks, ambulances, neighbors, passing clouds, and of course the doorbell. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In addition to the location change, we’re also changing the scope of the new videos. Instead of focusing on one report at a time, we’ll discuss how Search Console can help YOUR business. In each episode we’ll focus on types of website, like ecommerce, and job roles, like developers.

To hear about new videos as soon as they're published, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and feel free to leave feedback on Twitter.

Stay tuned!

Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate