What rules is Pinterest breaking?
And what would it mean for Google to treat "all sites equally"?
And what would it mean for Google to treat "all sites equally"?
They give the googlebot one answer and the user a different one. My understanding is that is a no-no.
Pintrest and Quora fit in this weird category like Expertsexchange; they get high search ranking because of the questions, but don’t deliver the answers.
This is why expertsexchange always had the answer at the bottom of the page and why most paywalls are disabled if referred from google.
Some might say that Pinterest's behavior is covered under the "Spam and Malware" section on that page, but clearly Google does not agree with that interpretation of Google's rules or else the search results would have been removed by now.
There are other sites requiring logins that appear in Google results, e.g. LinkedIn, and Google clearly doesn't see that as a rule violation either. If that was really a rule, Google would need to block a lot of major news sites as well, e.g. NY Times, WSJ, FT, Economist, etc. I'll believe Google's interpretation of their own rules, rather than someone's interpretation on Reddit.
If the search results lead to frustration -- and every pinterest result does -- that doesn't help Google. Ergo, those sites eventually get removed.
That's what's being violated. The GoogleBot gets the content, but not a human visiting the site. That's not what a user expects. That's why Pinterest and LinkedIn should be removed from Google search indexes.
Addendum We're not even talking about violating Google's T&C here. It's about how their ranking algorithm works. Try building a site and applying similar black-hat SEO tactics and watch your traffic disappear. Not for them.
>How can a search engine be useful if it doesn't include the most popular sites?
News has a relatively tiny set of providers. Information has a massive set of providers. Hence why Google can call the shots if you want to be in their engine. Pinterest only recently started getting ranked highly, owing to a weighting change, and it is a negative result for almost everyone.
You repeatedly keep citing the results themselves as validation that the results are correct. That isn't how it works, especially in the face of users saying "these Pinterest results suck and reduce my experience". Google constantly changes these things.
> Avoid the following techniques: [...] Creating pages with little or no original content [...] Cloaking
arguably apply to Pinterest to varying degrees. Specifically:
> Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
Different results than what I expect is 100% how I would categorise my encounters with Pinterest in Google results.