Mastering Pinterest SEO: An insider's guide | Hacker News Reader

Mastering Pinterest SEO: An insider's guide

blog.aesthetic.com

124 pointsjmilinovich66 comments

Pinterest is a cancer in the world of useful content. It's bad enough that they've destroyed Google image search, but now I see results from them bleeding on to regular search as well, which boggles my mind because Pinterest just links to other sites (while making it next to impossible to find the actual site.)

I hate Pinterest so much that I've set up a keyword shortcut in Chrome search for image search that adds "-site:pinterest.com" automatically when searching.

My now wife was using Pinterest as a kind of memo board for preparations for our wedding.

I signed up and even after a month the UI flow was so incomprehensible I had no idea how it was supposed to work. Achieving basic tasks was beyond me.

Yet lots of people with non tech brains seemed to just accept it's imperfections and inherently unpredictable UI as normal for modern technology.

I think there's a disconnection between tech people and other people. I know plenty of non tech people which are perfectly happy with pinterest, looking for cooking recipe or DIY ideas there and pinterest gives them perfectly what they're looking for. They don't care about it's impact on google search or other tech stuff.

It's just visual bookmarking, with the addition of your bookmarks being categorised how you like and publicly visible.

You sign up for pinterest. You create a couple of different boards. You install the pinterest extension.

Now when you browse the internet and you see an image you like you clicky the browser button (from the extension) and select what board of yours you want it to go to.

Or you can visit Pinterest and search for a thing, and browse the results, and then save some of those things to your boards.

Other people searching Google or Pinterest for a thing may be shown a link to your Pinterest board, and that link will include a link to your profile and your boards.

I agree the UI sucks, but all UI sucks. Pinterest's sucky UI isn't particularly worse than all the others.

It became irritating for me as well.. Yesterday one of the folks here shared a code for uBlock, working like a charm removing Pinterest from the search results.

  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])

  google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

"-site:..." didn't work well enough for me because they also have other domains besides ".com" to litter the web with, "-inurl:pinterest" works.

Wouldn’t that also remove results that just talk about Pinterest? Such as an article like this that has “pinterest” in its URL?

...I think that’s just fine for almost all searches

I honestly do not understand why google allows pinterest to wreck their image search.

I'm sure there is some sort of ad kick back, but it is just awful.

Its one of the main reasons I switched to duckduckgo as my default search.

Any GIS result that’s from Pinterest - I have NEVER been able to find the image shown in the preview on the resultant page.

Is there a way to just block a domain from my search results? I swear I used to be able to do this.

Per search, if you preface the site operator with - (e.g., -site:pinterest.com), it'll exclude that site. It doesn't help much because pinterest results pollute from multiple top level country domains.

Try -inurl:pinterest

`-site:domain.*` works to exclude all country codes.

Google used to have a Chrome extension called Personal Blocklist[1] for this but it's no longer available.

[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

It's rather easy to keep it out:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=kabedon+-site%3Apin....

It's easier to just use a search engine that values user experience.

Simple answer: Pinterest isn't for you
Less simple answer: Pinterest has 335 million active users for a reason. It's where people go to collect fantasy boyfriends from TV and movies (not a dig, it's a valid hobby), plan weddings, and generally anything where collecting images from around the web is useful. It's Pinboard for a completely different realm of niches from what you're familiar with.
Pinterest ranks because those results are useful for more people than they annoy.

> (not a dig, it's a valid hobby)
How is this valid? Seems like an awfully silly waste of time.

Who appointed you the fun czar?

I usurped the throne.

With all the personalization that Google employs, one should assume that it can figure this out or that it allows one to, for instance, in some setting, block Pinterest unless one explicitly ask for it by including the keyword “pinterest” in one's search.
Perhaps it should be possible to downvote search results to further create a better personalized effect — continually downvoting Pinterest should have a desired effect.

I've thought about this before, but it would be far to easily manipulated by bad actors - for example, one person says something that triggers the SJW/alt right/gamer/whatever crowd, then a million people downvote her website and her business is destroyed. It wouldn't work without a huge amount of moderation.

If the voting was just user-specific, that would be fantastic. Because I include a gobbledygook search term to exclude all Pinterest results, Google requires me to perform captchas very frequently, which isn't ideal either.

Try this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

As I said, it's a matter of personalization and wouldn't be visible to others.

It also acts as a pseudo-internet archive. The original images may not be easily found on the internet anymore, but Pinterest still has them scraped with broken clickthrough links. Which can be both useful and maddening.

> The original images may not be easily found on the internet anymore
They're not easily found because they come after 4 pages of Pinterest results in image search.

I’m talking more about the case in which you can search for an hour and check every result and it’s not anywhere anymore. But yes it’s often just ahead of the real result too.

Pinterest has proven useful many a times when I need to find photos, memes, graphics, evem retro computer catalog images!
On google images one can type -pinterest

More often than not the image is not in the pinterest result and it is always behind a login gate.
I understand the premise of pinterest, and have actually used it as a design board in the past.
My point is that as an image search result it is user hostile bullshit that frustrated me enough to stop using Google search as a daily tool.
You can talk about how I'm not the target all day, but that doesn't change the fact that it is an inferior user experience enabled by Google.

Maybe but the images being in google image search are worthless as one can not get to the actual image. (even by following the link)

'It's where people go to collect fantasy boyfriends from TV..'
This explains a lot.

> Its one of the main reasons I switched to duckduckgo as my default search.
Ditto. AMP and Pinterest are two daily frustrations with Google that pushed me to DDG. I would say DDG’s image search is clearly superior to Google’s, not only because it does a better job keeping out SEO spam. It also still allows you to link directly to the image.

Personally been very impressed with yandex image search lately. Their reverse search is like the good pre-ai google one where it actually searched for the image not just search for the ai defined content + color scheme.

What John says in this post about "Pinterest as a source of inbound links" is false. Pinterest uses rel="nofollow" on external links, which severs any value the links have for SEO.
For example:
Pin collection page: <a class="GestaltTouchableFocus" href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/83131400/ornaments-pine-cone-gn..." rel="nofollow"
Pin detail page: <a class="linkModuleActionButton" href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/83131400/ornaments-pine-cone-gn..." rel="nofollow">
You aren't going to improve your SEO by being on Pinterest, at least by getting links from Pinterest. It's possible someone else sees your site from browsing Pinterest and then links to it from their site.

Last time I was into SEO, the big "experts" seemed to agree that even nofollow links are useful for ranking. Now I'm not sure if it was just more bullshit (the industry is full of it), although it makes sense that with how widespread nofollow is these days, Google might have no choice but to take them into account. Otherwise they'd have to ignore like half the Web.

That's correct. If Google treated every Twitter/FB/Reddit link as useless just because those sites attach 'nofollow' to every external link, it would have a much worse idea of what links are relevant and what's not.
Nofollow is still useful for site owners that are using it as intended, and not as a site-wide policy. It's just that most sites do not get a fraction of the traffic a big tweet or Reddit post would get.

“What John says in this post about "Pinterest as a source of inbound links" is false. Pinterest uses rel="nofollow" on external links, which severs any value the links have for SEO.”
I almost didn’t read the article when I saw your comment, but I’m glad I did.
You’ve misunderstood what he said. There are two ways to parse the quote you claim is false.
1. "Pinterest as a source of inbound links [that enhance of your site’s rank on Google]"
2. "Pinterest as a source of inbound links [that delivers valuable traffic from a highly visible site like Pinterest]"
The 1st interpretation is easy to arrive at if you are reading the article with a how do I improve my rank on the SERP?, aka SEO mindset. This interpretation cares about improving domain authority.
The 2nd interpretation comes from a growth marketing mindset. Essentially, it seeks to answer a different question: how do I grow my referral traffic using well-placed pins on a high traffic site like Pinterest? This interpretation doesn’t care about domain authority, it cares about delivering more referral traffic to your website, increasing the likelihood of some of them converting into paying customers.
The article was clearly about the 2nd as is clearly evident from the last sentence of the section where the quote was lifted from:
“So, getting good at Pinterest doesn’t just help improve your Pinterest referral traffic, it can also improve your traffic from places like Google!”
This was an excellent article!

Nowadays Google claim that nofollow is subject to their interpretation of whether it counts as a citation or not, whereas previously they claimed it invariably did not count. As another poster mentioned, the conventional wisdom is that they always did count for something.
Google realises the link graph has been decimated by people trying to sculpt Pagerank-esque ranking factors and that a larger part of it is/was using nofollow.

Pinterest and GIS (Google Image Search) are so bad now. I find things in GIS and click on it, and it opens pinterest. And then when I'm in Pinterest I click on the image again because I'm trying to track down the original place the image came from, and when I click on it, it literally LOADS a Google Image Search Result page. For Google to reward this behavior must mean they no longer have anyone actually updating GIS anymore. It's probably in permafrost maintenance mode.

I am just waiting for the (moment of true) to hit us all. After 20 years of advancements in web technology we are an inch from making it useful only for ad companies and consumer driven behaviour. Is usenet valuable alternative for filtering out tons of crap pushed by ad empires ?

Google has never felt more ripe for disruption. Their main product is utter trash and the DOJ is actively seeking to decouple their moat.
If you use Google search, you're admitting that you want ads. Google rearranges the results to prefer AMP and other ad infested properties before relevant results.
The internal Google culture is fucked. They launch random things and close them, all to feed their chaotic promo cycle. It leads to distrust and anger amongst users. I'm still furious about Google Play Music going away. YouTube music recently put this [1] in my indie music playlist.
Their current CEO reminds me of Ballmer. They need to bring in a Nadella to save things and make Google cool again. Also, when's the last time we heard from Page, Brin, or Schmidt? I thought they cared more.
FWIW, I've started using Bing and I've been quite happy with it.
> After 20 years of advancements in web technology we are an inch from making it useful only for ad companies and consumer driven behaviour. Is usenet valuable alternative for filtering out tons of crap pushed by ad empires ?
Google is responsible for the web atrophying. Once Google and Facebook have been chastised by the DOJ, we might see a return to form for the web. If not, maybe we should start building more distributed / p2p content distribution. How difficult would it be to design semantic markup for blogs and comments, and start "torrenting" news articles in a web of trust? Signal to noise ratio would skyrocket. This sort of design keeps the marketers out completely.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxp8qPEwSXM (decidedly not indie or alt rock music)

Bing has undoubtedly the best image search. I don't think Google will be able to be cool again. This concept of coolness was fake from the get go. I keep hearing about the decentralisation of internet, but so far nothing is happening on a big scale to give an alternative.

To be honest, I think Google and search engines should delist Pinterest pictures from their image search. And from all search in general.
Why? Because their data is not really usable. To even view it, Pinterest forces you to log in.
Why must I log in? If your data is not meant for the internet, then don’t allow it to be indexed.

What I don't understand is why pinterest can survive in a world of DMCA takedowns.
I mean, their whole business model is stealing content they don't own.

I guess there's no big organisation fighting image copyright the way there is with film or music.

I believe Getty images is quite large in owning the image copyright space and is also pretty aggresive in enforcing.

Getty are quite successful at pursuing the little guy via aggressive emails and sock-puppet forum accounts. Maybe not so effective against the big guy with lawyers on the payroll?

Their business model is connecting buyers with products and they are making bank which gives them strong influence.

Alternative title: How to make people waste time when they're using Google Images.

Pinterest is honestly a relatively fine platform with interesting and well thought out apps (can't say that about some of the major players). It just hurts that they keep spamming search results. You'd think at this point it would do more to hurt their brand than help it.
If they had the simplest tool to help tracking down an image's source at least they would provide any value.

Message to pinterest: Please stop ruining google image search. Please. Just stop

Pinterest is definitely an expert level content farm. For Google Image Search in particular, you're right that it does create a bit of a broken end user experience that feels a bit misleading.
It's surprising that Google hasn't cracked down on this yet or dealt with the obvious dupes problem (showing image result from Pinterest that came from website a vs showing result from website a).

And google search. I was googling around to try to understand how a trailer suspension is designed, and I had pinterest on the first page. Do people actually buy their engineering explanations from Pinterest?

Pinterest <3's the longtail :) I'd imagine they have some good diagrams of trailer suspension designs, but almost certainly not as good as a solid YouTube video or blog post..

even without pinterest, G search is dysfunctional with its side pane. Yandex is better

Yandex seemed to skew towards non-US/English resources (in Europe, tbf), which could be a good thing depending on what you're looking for.
I just tried it again and I have to say I'm impressed by the results. It's like an earlier Google. I tried a few searches that made me rage on Google (dnsmasq, HP/Win10 and ACPI, Openwrt and TomatoUSB related) and Yandex actually shows some decent stuff.
Like holy hell, Google tried very hard to show trash from the biggest websites like Youtube (of course), Microsoft (fuck their answers forums, honestly), HP (ditto), Reddit (actually useful), the usual. Even Github is lower in the rankings.
Bing is slightly better, but not by much. Yandex shows some useful links I haven't come across. Very interesting, I need to remember to use it more.

Yandex is particularly good at finding people, especially if you work out the crop tool.

You should re-address your message to google.

For the sake of SEO, Pinterest needs to go.

The most effective form of SEO these days is paying for ads.

So I wonder how long it will take the disinformation teams to start leveraging their content on Pinterest (or did I miss the start already?).

If I'm not mistaken they moderate anti-vax content, or claimed to do so many years ago at the least. Who knows how far that goes

Probably Pinterest is preparing to be acquired. That's why their SEO strategy is perfect!

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