Technical SEO for Pinterest

One of my favorite aspects of Pinterest is how they open they are about their algorithm. Their ML team regularly publishes papers here that describe updates to how they rank pins, or in other words how they decide which pins to show to users when they perform searches on the platform.

In their paper Improving Pinterest Search Relevance Using Large Language Models they detail how they are starting to incorporate LLMs into the algorithm. In the paper they list the important attributes of each pin they use to decide their relevance to user’s searches. Unsurprisingly, attributes like title and description are included but another key factor they mention is “the titles and descriptions of (outbound) URLs.” This makes sense since Pinterest is a platform designed to make the user click on outbound links. They WANT their users to end up on pinner’s websites. That is why they also state “A key metric optimized for Pinterest Search is the "long click", which occurs when a user clicks through to a Pin’s linked webpage and spends over ten seconds there.” So it is important for Pinterest to understand the contents of the websites that pins are linking to.

In order to obtain details about the websites that pins link to, Pinterest uses a tool called Pinterestbot to scrape the webpages in a similar way google uses Googlebot for their search. My websites up until now were not “Pinterestbot friendly.” To change this I did the following:

• Updated every page on my websites to have meta tags in my headers. These are HTML elements that describe what is on a webpage to a bot like Pinterestbot and include things like a description of what is on the page and a title of the page.

• Created a robots.txt. This is a file that gives explicit permission to robots to scrape a website and exists as a standalone page. You can go to https://anyeradesign.com/robots.txt to see one of mine.

• Added sitemaps. This is another page that is added for robots. It details where are all the pages on a website are and includes information about when they were last updated and how many images are each page. You can see one of mine at https://anyeradesign.com/sitemap.xml

• Added alt tags to all my images. These are HTML elements that provide simple descriptions of images on webpages. Pinterest is essentially a visual search engine so it is important that it can see the images on linked sites and verify they are similar to the image of the linked pin.

With all of these updates it will be very easy for Pinterestbot to see all the pages on my website and get a clear understanding of their contents. This should help my pins rank because the algorithm will have more information about their outbound link destinations and be able to confirm their relevancy.