Pinterest impacts ratings—we just learned this the hard way.
A couple of months ago, one of our client’s websites was blocked by Pinterest. When users tried to go to visit their website they saw the below warning message:
Not only did this lead to a huge loss in traffic and sales, but it also impacted their rankings on Google. Before the block the website had ranked #6 for a key term that drove most of their traffic and sales. After the block the website dropped all the way down to #14 for this key term. Their average position over all went from #12 to #22 and their overall traffic went down to 50% of what it had been the year before.
This client found themselves blocked because they had essentially spammed Pinterest. While they did post a good mix of their own and other website’s content on the account, they were posting their own products repeatedly. Pinterest expressly prohibits this and unfortunately for this client it resulted in their website being blocked.
To try and get the website unblocked by Pinterest we asked customers of this website to reach out to Pinterest and ask that they unblock the site. We had seen that this worked for some blogs, so we figured it was worth trying. This tactic, in combination with removing all the pins in their account, allowed them to get unblocked by Pinterest.
Once Pinterest unblocked their website the rankings changed over night. They literally went from the #14 position to the #5 position for their key term over night. Not only that but the rankings are actually better than before thanks to an assortment of other improvements we made trying to help fix the ranking issue. We implement speed improvements, copy improvements and got several links for the key term. It just goes to show that even with all those changes only Pinterest was powerful enough to move the site back to the first page for this very competitive search term.
