Black Friday 2026 is 27 November. Most of the work that matters happens in October.
Rui Correia Posted
Black Friday falls on 27 November in 2026, with Cyber Monday on the 30th. Neither date is really the point any more.
Retailers start discounting in early November and some run the whole month. The single-day event stopped being a single day years ago, which changes what you should be doing and when.
The dates that actually matter
- Early October — audit last year's pages. This is the highest-value week of the whole run.
- Mid to late October — publish and let Google find the pages before the competition arrives.
- Early November — the first real discounts land. Your pages should already be live and ranking.
- 27 November — Black Friday. Mostly a monitoring day.
- 30 November — Cyber Monday.
- Early December — the week most publishers waste. Traffic is still high and the pages are still there.
Publishing a deals page on the 26th is publishing it three weeks late.
Start with last year’s pages
Your Black Friday pages from last year already have age, links and whatever ranking they earned. Rebuilding them beats starting again, and it’s a fraction of the work.
The order I’d go in:
- Find them. Anything with Black Friday in the title or URL from the last two years.
- Check every link still resolves. Retailers leave networks and programmes close, and a dead link is invisible until you look.
- Strip the years out of the copy where you can, so the page ages better next time.
- Update the products. Last year's best buy is this year's discontinued line.
- Re-date and republish.
If you have a lot of them, a free link audit is faster than clicking through by hand. It'll tell you which links are going through your own accounts, which are being monetised by somebody else, and which have stopped earning entirely.
The thing that always breaks
Prices.
On a normal week a product page with a price on it is fine for a few days. In the last week of November prices move hourly, stock disappears, and a page saying £299 when the retailer is charging £249 is worse than a page with no price at all — the reader clicks, sees the difference, and stops trusting you.
Out of stock is the other one. Nothing wastes a click like a sold-out product sitting at the top of a round-up on the busiest shopping day of the year.
This is the one genuinely mechanical problem in the whole exercise, and it is why live pricing exists. Product data refreshing every two to four hours across every connected retailer means the page is right without anyone watching it.
What to do on the day
Less than you’d think, if October went well.
- Watch which pages are actually getting traffic, not which ones you expected to.
- Move the products that are converting up the page.
- Pull anything that has gone out of stock.
- Leave the rest alone.
The temptation is to publish more. Usually the better move is to improve the two or three pages already working.
The week after
December is where publishers leave money on the table. The traffic hasn’t gone, the intent is still there, and the pages are already built.
Update rather than archive. Christmas delivery cut-offs, January sales, whatever fits the vertical. The same page can carry the whole season if you keep it current.
What I’d do first
Pull up last year's Black Friday pages and check the links. That's it — that's the first job, and it's usually the one that finds the most money. The audit does it in about a minute.
Common questions
When is Black Friday 2026?
27 November 2026, with Cyber Monday on 30 November. Most retailers start discounting in early November.
When should publishers publish Black Friday content?
Mid to late October, so pages are indexed and ranking before the discounts start in early November.
How do I stop Black Friday prices going out of date?
Use live pricing that refreshes automatically rather than hard-coded prices. During Black Friday week prices change hourly.
What should I do with last year’s Black Friday pages?
Rebuild rather than replace. They already have age and links. Check every link still resolves, update the products, strip out the year references and republish.