Published by Waqas Nasir
Most online stores start thinking about links in October. That is about six weeks before Black Friday, and it is too late for the best options. Editors have already planned their gift guides. Search engines need time to find and trust new pages. The sites that earn the good placements started in the summer.
This guide explains why timing matters, gives you a week-by-week plan, and shows what to do if you are reading this too late. It's written for store owners and marketers, so there is no jargon you can't look up in a minute.
The money is concentrated in a few weeks. In the US, the National Retail Federation (NRF) expects holiday sales of between $1.01 trillion and $1.02 trillion for 1 November to 31 December 2025, up 3.7% to 4.2% on 2024. Its figure leaves out car dealers, gas stations and restaurants. Online, Adobe measured $44.2 billion in spending over Cyber Week (Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday) in 2025, with $11.8 billion on Black Friday and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday.
These are US numbers. Your market has its own peaks, such as Singles' Day, Boxing Day or a local sale festival. The idea is the same: a few weeks decide a big share of the year, so what you prepare months earlier is what counts.
Three facts explain why you can't leave links to the last minute.
1. Search engines are not instant. Google's own documentation says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after you ask it to look at a page.
2. New pages rarely rank quickly. In a study of 1 million random URLs, Ahrefs found that only 1.74% of newly published pages reached the top 10 of Google within a year. That figure covers every URL its crawler found. For pages with real English content created in one month (October 2023), the figure was 6.11%, which Ahrefs calls a fairer number. Either way, most new pages don't get there quickly. The same study found that 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than three years old, and the average page in position one is five years old.
3. Editors plan early. Gift guides and roundups are some of the best places to earn links before a sale. PR professionals interviewed by PR News in 2022 advised pitching about two months before a guide's deadline, and said summer is the best time for the first approach. Early pitches get noticed before inboxes fill up.
What this means for you: a page that is live and linked from good sites in the summer has a head start over a page launched in November.
Count back from your sale date. For Black Friday 2026 (27 November), week 20 starts on 10 July. Here is what to do and when.
| When | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 20 to 16 (10 July to 7 August) | Fix the basics. Choose the page that will carry the sale. Check your menus and internal links. Prepare content and data that others can use. | Links are only worth earning for pages that work well. |
| Weeks 16 to 12 (7 August to 4 September) | Start outreach to long-lead publishers: gift guide editors, roundup writers, bloggers in your niche. Offer something useful, such as samples, data or an expert comment. | Editors plan early, and your first approach can take weeks. |
| Weeks 12 to 8 (4 September to 2 October) | Add placements: guest articles, link insertions, partnerships with complementary brands. | The links need time to be found and counted. |
| Weeks 8 to 4 (2 to 30 October) | Fill gaps. Follow up on pitches. Add internal links to the sale page from your own best content. | Your own links cost nothing and take effect quickly. |
| Weeks 4 to 0 (November) | Stop big changes. Keep the sale URL stable. Watch referral traffic and indexing. | Changes during the peak create risk without a clear gain. |
| After the sale (weeks 1 to 6) | Review what worked. Thank partners. Keep the page and its links for next year. | The same page can carry your links into next year. |
Be specific about where links should land. Three kinds of pages are worth the effort.
Individual product pages rarely earn links on their own, except for a hero product with a story. Don't spend your effort there first.
For a deeper look at how links inside your own site work, read our guide to internal linking best practices.
rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Our guide to link rel attributes explains how.If you are reading this in early October, you have about eight weeks until Black Friday 2026. You can still improve your position. Use a short version of the plan.
Set realistic goals. Links that arrive in October may help more with next year's sale than with this one.
Don't judge a campaign by one number. Look at four things: whether the links are live, whether the page is indexed, how many people arrive from those links, and how your rankings and sales for the sale pages change over the months. Our guide to measuring link building success shows how.
Some placements involve payment. Whether a publisher shows a visible label such as "Sponsored" depends on the publisher and the country. When we place links for clients, we tell you before you approve a site if a placement will carry a label, and you decide whether to go ahead.
Our ecommerce link building service helps online stores plan placements around their sale dates. You choose the sites from a shortlist and approve the content before it's published. Links usually go live within 24 to 72 hours after you approve the content, which makes our service a fit for the later weeks of the plan, when you need to fill gaps.
Checked on 1 October 2026.
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