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Almost one year ago I had the pleasure of meeting two Pinterest employees at Mom2.0, a conference for bloggers. A small group of us stayed after the session and had the opportunity to “get real” with them and chat about some things that were on bloggers’ minds such as stolen pins, rich pins, Pinterest best practices, and more.
This relationship has been an honest and open door that we have kept up since the conference and in light of recent Pinterest changes, I asked for some clarification and solid numbers for bloggers. As I’ve mentioned to Pinterest, bloggers will follow the rules if you give them rules–but you have to give them specific rules.
I have had multiple meetings with Pinterest over the last few weeks and given a lot of feedback to them from bloggers about some things that are happening at Pinterest. I feel that they are beginning to understand where we are coming from and as more information comes out, I’ll update this post for you.
I co-wrote this post with my Pinterest rep. Pinterest asked that I post this on my blog for bloggers to see–originally we discussed posting it in Facebook groups but decided it was easier to read and save if it was on a blog.
What is considered Spam on Pinterest?
Pinterest users are reporting that seeing a board with the same Pin multiple times (even if that is over the course of many months) is spammy, AND they’re reporting those Pins and boards.
In order to not be considered spam (and have your account shut down):
1. Don’t Pin the same Pin to the same board multiple times.
2. Click through Pins to make sure that you’re not Pinning a Pin that leads to a spammy site. You can also test to see if a link is spammy using these tips: (website removed)
3. Make sure the Pin image is relevant to the webpage it’s linking to.
4. Sites with pop-ups, sites that are very heavy on ads, and sites that have a slow load time are considered spammy.
Note: Account suspensions don’t happen with one “negative action.” There are usually several strikes against your account by the time your account is reviewed and suspended.
Are duplicate pins ok on Pinterest?
I explained that as bloggers with a ton of posts and Pins, we repin often. And of course, more repins = more website visits = more money for us, so more is better for bloggers and we really need specifics.
Pinterest explained that our boards should not have duplicate Pins. A few times is ok, but if a regular person would look at your board and notice the ‘same pin,’ then it’s getting risky. They will take into consideration things like Tailwind glitches (like when Tailwind Pinned duplicate Pins for all of us at the end of last year).
Approved Schedulers for Pinterest
This can’t be said enough: do NOT use unapproved schedulers. If the scheduler asks for your username and password, it is a security risk and you shouldn’t be using it. If it’s an approved scheduler, it’ll have a popup that brings you to the Pinterest site and asks you to approve the app (oAuth).
You can find a list of all approved Pinterest partner tools right here.
Long vs Short Pins on Pinterest
The tall giraffe Pins are slowly losing traction and are losing distribution. Anything longer than 2:3 will be in danger of being cut off (think about the tilted Pins on the business profiles–if it’s getting cut off there, it’ll also show up cut off in other places in the same way).
Pinterest gave us a warning about this way in advance (like, two years ago), so that we could change our image layouts. The changes are still in progress and the 2:3 aspect ratio will continue to be emphasized.
Do Pin and board descriptions matter?
Descriptions make your Pins and boards more useful to Pinners and help with distribution. We recommend adding descriptions to all your boards and Pins, along with descriptive titles.
Does categorizing boards help with SEO?
Yes, categorizing your boards does help with search engine optimization. To edit your board category, just click or tap the pencil icon in the lower right corner of your board, then select select the category that best represents your board.
How does Pinterest use keywords? Should I include them in my descriptions?
Yes! Good keywords will help your content get to the right audience and give helpful context to Pinners. Pro tip: Try out a search yourself to find out what results show up with certain keywords.
What’s the difference between keywords and hashtags? And when should I use each?
Both keywords and hashtags make your Pins easier to find. Keywords help with search and give important context about your Pins and boards to Pinners. Adding hashtags helps Pinners discover your Pins. Each hashtag you add automatically creates a link that Pinners can tap to see other Pins with that same hashtag. People can discover hashtags in places like search results and Pin descriptions. When you visit a hashtag feed, the freshest Pins are featured up top.
For my descriptions, should I use full sentences or only keywords?
People are reading these, so sentences work best. But remember that robots are also indexing these, so make sure to include strong keywords.
There’s a new “Creators” landing page with case studies and tips. Good overview for anyone getting started: https://business.pinterest.com/en/creators. You can also email Creator support at Creators-Support@pinterest.com.
Tailwind Tribes
Look to join and maintain smaller tribes with good quality control. Tribes that are helping to distribute spammy Pins are becoming an issue–don’t assume that because you see a Pin in a Tribe, it’s “safe.” Look for familiar URLs and click through the Pins you don’t recognize to see if it leads to a spammy site or a quality one.
How many times a day should I be Pinning?
Pin a handful of times or a lot, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re following the spam rules and doing it authentically (not blindly). Pinterest understands that a smaller blogger with less posts/Pins is going to Pin less than a larger blogger with 1,000 posts/Pins. The most important thing is to save ideas consistently and steadily, rather than in one single flurry.
What’s the deal with Group Boards?
While group boards are a great way to collaborate with friends and family, they are not good mechanisms for getting distribution. The ones that follow Pinterest’s wishes are small group boards that are all Pinning about a small handful of related topics (healthy recipes and fitness; kids crafts and recipes, etc). Go find a few bloggers that are similar to you and have great content and create a niche group board. Pinterest wants collaboration, not group boards that hack the distribution of Pins/algorithm. <— this was stressed many times during our phone calls.
What I’m doing different
I manage my own Pinterest account as well as a few accounts for brands and bloggers. I’m changing the way all of the accounts are managed due to these changes.
Personally, I’ll no longer be adding duplicate Pins to boards. I’ll be evaluating where my Pins link to very closely and paying more attention to Tailwind’s little ! warnings that say “you’ve Pinned this Pin to the same board.”
I’ll be creating more new Pins for posts so I can still share my newest and more popular recipes in ways that don’t look as spammy. Right now, I create 4-6 per post and each focuses on a different category of the post (Weight Watchers, Healthy, 21 Day Fix, cooking method, etc). I’ll be making at least 2 Pins for each of these categories now.
I’m leaving any tribe that isn’t managed by someone I know or has ANY spammy looking Pins. I’m also creating a few tribes and hiring someone to check them weekly for rule following and quality links. My assistants will have lists of “safe” accounts to Pin from.
I’ll be Pinning more from bloggers I know and less from unknown sources. If I Pin about a certain topic, I’ll be creating tribes to help fill my boards and filling those Tribes with high quality bloggers.
I’ve been blogging for 10 years and using Pinterest since day 1. As a user I’ve saved the same content more than once because I forgot I saved it. How is that any different than bloggers cycling through to re save their pins to the same board months later?
As a blogger this information is frustrating especially as I update old posts and update the keywords on descriptions to help the pins gain better reach.
I don’t have time to search my boards for every pin of mine to delete the old ones so I can share the new ones. Especially since the Pinterest search function doesn’t even show the pins 50% of the time even when the keywords I am searching for are present In the description. I’m often searching through my boards to find my own pins.
And then you get to the root of the problem which is ACTUAL spammy pins from accounts that have stolen our pins and redirected them to their own spammy website. Like others have said Pinterest solution so far is useless, time consuming, and ineffective.
If this is the case Pinterest will cease to be part of my marketing strategy. I’m getting almost as much traffic from Facebook as Pinterest and at least Facebook’s policies are clearly defined.
Is there anyone actually in charge at Pinterest? Seriously different stories from them everyday.
Only pinning a pin to a board once is crazy. I’ve been a Pinterest user since the first year and I’ve never looked at someone’s boards as a user. I used to go by my feed but now it’s full of irrelevant ads so I primarily use search as a user.
Just please above all else put one team in charge, and put a content creators rule page on your Pinterest for business section. That is all we want.
I may not agree with All of face books rules, but at least I know what they are and that’s where my ad money is being spent currently.
Thanks for saving me from writing a comment as you’ve hit the nail on the head. Pinterest seems to have suicidal wishes. Why do they have to shoot themselves in the foot all the time?! Crazy.
Wow. Well, ok then, Pinterest. I guess with your new rule about duplicate pins, I may as well stop paying for your approved partner Tailwind with looping. Congratulations. You just saved me a ton of money. Also, can you define “few?” For the sake of clear cut guidelines. What’s the point of using Pinterest if I can’t repin my own pins? Do you really think I believe you’re going to continue to show my pins to people months down the road? I mean, sure we can rephotograph and recreate new pins every time we go to pin a post. Sounds like a fantastic use of all that time you seem to think we have. Sounds like a rock solid plan. Instead of biting the hand that feeds you, why not actually listen and understand where we’re coming from? All of that said, I am grateful to have Pinterest because it’s a huge part of my business plan. But this just confirms my decision to focus in on SEO. Because this is unrealistic and ridiculous. Now excuse me while I go throw my laptop out the window.
I’m confused why they are even bothering to work with tailwind.
Who looks at boards? I pin bc I have to and search if I’m looking for something. Even regular tailwind is pointless if this is the case.
And honestly, what user is marking a pin as spam is they see it twice on a board? Who has time for that?
This is so crazy! I just paid for a full year of Smartloop, but now it seems like we shouldn’t be using that at all. This will dramatically change the way I use Pinterest.
Not pinning the same pin to the same board is honestly absurd as a content creator/business owner. Could you imagine if Facebook made a rule to never share the same content on my business page again with the hope that they’ll eventually show it to people? I totally understand the concept of spamming Pinterest with too many of the same pin but if they’re our own boards (not group boards) and good content being cycled through – how in the world is that spammy? I’m filling a board with high-quality content that goes to the correct place it’s supposed to.
I would prefer that Pinterest start focusing on the people who are actually spamming the platform by stealing blogger images and replacing the URLs with their own. I can’t begin to count how many of my images have been stolen, uploaded with someone else’s URL that obviously has nothing to do with the content in the image, and that has knocked my own pin out of a top ranked spot in search. There are literally programs and courses out there teaching people how to do this and in those courses they are saying Pinterest isn’t doing anything about this, so you’ll be fine. Those are the people who should be getting in trouble and flagged for spam – not true content creators.
I guess if this no duplicate pin thing is actually happening (and Pinterest rules have changed so many times over the past two years, I’m not sure I believe anything anymore) then at least there’s a silver living – less money spent on Tailwind and less time spent on Pinterest. Pin something once and move on. More time to focus on platforms that are rewarding content creators, not making arbitrary rules that show they don’t understand how content creation/business owners work in the slightest.
This is crazy. Not pinning the same image is crazy. I have a massive blog with over a thousand posts. I pin manually, based on what my readers want to see. I don’t have time to create a zillion images for the same posts, and it feels deceptive to my readers. I even employ someone to help me with Pinterest and I am concerned about what this will mean for her job. I agree also that it needs to be easier to report and resolve stolen pins. People steal my pins all the time, which costs me money and lots more. Pinterest has been a huge help to me but saying it’s spam when we have repeated pins is absolutely not true. Very concerned about this for my business.
I do not understand why Pinterest just doesn’t give the business users solid rules to follow. Why is it always so vague and mysterious? I feel like this whole blog post is an off-site test to measure the reaction from the blogging community and nothing else.
We get policy changes through 3rd party channels, who does that? How do you run a business like that?
I don’t care what Pinterest does, I don’t care what the rules are, I’d just like to know what they are, like really are, not stuff you’re testing for 2 weeks and abandoning. Not random terms like “often”, “spammy”, “sometimes”, give us clarity on how to use your platform effectively and knock off all this grade school stuff.
Who is running that place?
Oh and also, could you actually do something about the glitches, stolen pins, and useless email help support channels? That would be great.
Okay, since I’ve been blogging for nearly 10 years and I’ve pinned my most popular articles dozens of times, this is a little frightening. I have articles that do well in cycles, (like holiday posts) – I’m not trying to be spammy but I want to get the information to people every year. I realize I could create new images every year but that’s a lot of time. I hope Pinterest backs down on this duplicate pin rule!
Is the end game for the decision makers at Pinterest to have 100% stolen content on their platform? That’s what will be left when the actual creators just focus elsewhere. They are entirely too vague, too indecisive, too passive on stolen content, too punitive on legitimate sources, too anonymous, too flip floppy. Most ‘real’ people I talk to now haven’t even heard of Pinterest. It’s ALL about Instagram. I do get the bulk of my traffic from this particular medium right now (organic search a close second and creeping higher!) but I suppose I will be slowing down to a trickle when it comes to sharing on Pinterest as I don’t want to run the risk of losing my page altogether. I feel like creating 50 different pins for the same post makes MY site seem spammy so I won’t be doing that. Sigh.
I agree with ALL of the complaints above. One issue I have, should this rule about not re-pinning the same pin to the same board actually stick, is that Pinterest has stopped giving the warning that I’ve already pinned something to a certain board on desktop (it still shows on mobile). If they really care about not pinning the same pins to the same boards, they should definitely make it a priority to have that warning come up!
So, my biggest takeaway is that I need to create multiple boards in order to re-pin my content. Essentially, I’ll just have redundant boards instead of redundant pins. What gives? This nitpicking from Pinterest seems illogical. If they looked at it from the content creator’s view, the ones who give them reason to have a platform in the first place, they’d see how infuriating these “rules” are. In the long run, I think they will see bloggers focus less and less on Pinterest and more on other things. I hope and pray a new platform is created by people who understand blogging to replace Pinterest. This is just an uphill battle that no one wants to engage. ☹️
Pinterest- if you are reading> I have been a blogger 10 years. I love Pinterest. I use it as a consumer AND as a blogger, but every time you give an interview with someone you set up an instant chain reaction of bloggers changing EVERYTHING and nearly 99% of what you say, leads to nothing but more work with no results. There is only so much content a blogger has- we cannot continue to make 100 boards in order to advertise our work. In the past few years I have seen it go from group boards being awesome to group boards being nothing. From no hashtags, to oh use hashtags and everyone editing everything, to almost no consumers USING hashtags. Last year we head to make short pins and everyone ran out to do that, countless hours, and the long pins are the ones consumers save and click on. What we want you to do is put back whatever voodoo you did in 2017 where things were great for bloggers, that we were rewarded for activity and shares, where bloggers could collaborate and where you stopped showing the same 25 websites over and over again in the results. And lastly, please focus on CONTENT THEFT. Stop regulating what we do, which is excellent work that makes Pinterest go round, and start helping us find ways to PROTECT our work. Every blogger I know works daily on Pinterest, has VAs, makes pins (Short, medium, long) and we spend more on making PInterest perfect than any other social media and the clicks have gone down and down and done with every bit of advice. What we want is you on our side, not making it a site we have to be on 3 hours a day. Even Google doesnt get that much attention.
This is perfect timing. I’m a food blogger ready to invest in a marketing course and a steady ad budget. My only decision has been Pinterest or Facebook. With the new rule about no duplicate pins on a single board, my decision is easy. Why would I go through the time to create a pin to only be used once? So if I start making hundreds of boards to follow the rule, how is THAT not being spammy? I guess Facebook will get my time and ad dollars.
This article needs more substance, we need more details, not the vague details that are here!
I totally agree that these details need to come directly from Pinterest and they need to be thought through and given in clear plain English that isn’t retracted in a weeks time!
Are they trying to kill the platform and their approved API businesses because this seems the direction they are taking if this is to be believed!
I’m disappointed with Pinterest, we create the Pins and help make the platform a success, really there needs more thought into how we work together and not pushing us away!
The only way forward is through great SEO!
I have (and do) pin the same image multiple times (as often as only a few days apart to my own boards – less often to group boards) and have also been in direct contact with people at pinterest – when my account got marked as spam last year – who told me that it was absolutely a mistake and that my account was NOT spammy. I get 8-10k page views per day from Pinterest and I honestly think no one at pinterest actually knows how their platform works “in the wild”. I don’t think it’s a real thing… I think it’s something some one in one department thinks. At least, I hope that’s what it is. What will be the point of tailwind if not?
Don’t Pin the same Pin to the same board multiple times. – Like really? I have hundreds of boards & thousands of posts. I now need to spend the better part of my time creating spreadsheets to keep track of where each and every pin is going so posts from several years ago don’t get pinned by accident to the same board?? How is old content ever suppose to be seen again when they suppress everything that doesn’t already have traction?
Click through Pins to make sure that you’re not Pinning a Pin that leads to a spammy site. – Sounds really tedious when I’m just collecting ideas and something I def wouldn’t do when pinning on mobile. This would literally make pining a massive P.I.T.A. & certainly a way to make me not want to spend my time on the platform.
Sites with pop-ups, sites that are very heavy on ads, and sites that have a slow load time are considered spammy. – this is all from the perspective of the individual user. Some people see one pop-up or ad & freak out and others barely notice 20 of them. Not to mention that slow load can have a lot to do with how much a smaller site may be able to afford when it comes to hosting. So it seems to benefit those they have already deemed their favorites & those they already give preferential treatment to when it comes to what gets shown & how often.
Once again – they just don’t get it. They made it big off our backs and the hard work that goes into making the content that drives people there. Then they give us the big middle finger and tie our hands behind our backs.
I think after reading the comments, all my thoughts have already been voiced here. I’ve been blogging for over a year and I’m already disheartened with the countless changes that keep occurring. I hope more clarity and some regularity is coming in the future.
Others have pretty much nailed my thoughts and concerns but here’s my two cents, so Pinterest, if you’re listening:
Please reconsider the “spamming rule.” A content creator pinning the same pin to a board should not equate to spam. We are not the bad guys. We are not the spammers. There are people out there stealing pins, lifting content and using Pinterest as a free space to be shady. Worry about THEM. Go after THEM.
Do you look at Tailwind before you make these rules? I bought Tailwind and I’ve invested time and money to learn how to use it because it’s “Pinterest approved.” I just started getting the hang of how to effectively use the Smart Loop and now it appears Pinterest is going to ding me for my time and trouble, not to mention my money.
While I appreciate any info – and appreciate you, Becca, for putting it out there, a lot of this info is ambiguous. Why can’t Pinterest write their own rules, publish them, and own their own platform?
Thanks for that, it’s very helpful.
Just one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned here – does pinning directly from the website versus re-pinning own pin from Pinterest matters?
And is new Pinterest scheduler going to replace Tailwind?
Thanks!