Monday, October 1, 2012

Pinterest's SEO Pays Off, Infringees Suffer

pinterest seo
As predicted, Pinterest pages are now rising above
the original content in SERPs.


Photographer Mark Tisdale, in his article Search Engines Should Reward Original Works reports:
What I couldn’t help noticing as I worked my way through the results, my photo hosted on my site was the dead last that Google showed in its results. [...]it would ameliorate the cause for concern for a great many visual artists who feel they have to police the internet because of sites like Pinterest and the many clones that have sprung up over night. There’s no white washing for theft, particularly theft for profit, but at least those other copies shouldn’t dilute the brand of the content creator.
Meanwhile, on Webmasterworld, a webmaster laments:
My site is retail so our products end up all over these types of sites (pinterest, kaboodle, wanelo, etc.) only this year we've been noticing that these sites are outranking us for our own products and descriptions we wrote ourselves. Not sure if this is a widespread problem that everyone is seeing or if this is an indication of a problem with our site.

I just don't understand how another site can outrank us.
Another has this to say:
I'm seeing this too. The problem is that it creates an extra step between you and your potential customer. Getting outranked with your own descriptions and creating an extra gap between you and customers will not improve business. More and more online retailers are posting their products on such sites but might be in for an unpleasant surprise when those pages outrank the original.
We have warned our readers, in both Clone Wars and Nasty Linking Practices, of the danger that our original content be buried under the weight of duplicated images from crowdscrapers. The posts received a lot of attention from private "pro member" forums from Zazzle, to which I have no access. I understand that much of that attention was critical and skeptical.

Creators Against Pinterest's prediction is being borne out by results. The prophecy has been fulfilled.

It was, unfortunately, quite easy to see that one coming for anyone with enough experience and accurate knowledge of how search engines rank websites. Many people don't really bother peeking under the hood - they are the ones that will get burned by their excitement of a few extra visitors from Pinterest, failing to realize their net traffic is dropping quite possibly because of Pinterest.

1 comment:

Libby said...

I commented here about this back in July when I was looking for a kitchen tool. It took me a good half hour to track down the vendor. Chasing pin after repin was a giant waste of my time.