Dealing with Pinterest Traffic | Best Practices?

[Imperi]

I've not been able to determine what a best practice might be in this situation. Maybe you can help.

One of my sites (built on Wordpress) had a blog post go viral on Pinterest. We went from about 1-200 visits a day to more than 17,000 visits daily. All the traffic was basically coming through this one blog post. The site was not built to accommodate that much traffic. We quickly received a call from the hosting company that they had to take our site down because of the load that was being placed on the server (shared hosting.)

This is a small, niche site. The products & services being advertised are extremely niche. There is no intent to ever have huge amounts of traffic because we know the customer base is so small.

In order to keep the site up, and to reduce the amount of traffic coming from Pinterest, the hosting company modified the .htaccess file to block all traffic coming from pinterest.com.

We know that 99% of all the traffic coming from Pinterest not only were not potential customers, but are in the wrong demographic. So, there's no worry for us in losing that traffic.

I also know we're not the first site this has happened to.

So, what's the best practice here?

[ConradBarrett11]

I dont believe in block any traffic and I dont think 99% of your traffic is useless. Explain to your host what is going on and work with them about the post going viral. I think it's weak of your host to even suggest blocking your traffic instead of being up the task of handling traffic. Tell the host that you are willing to pay extra to cover the week of the increased traffic lasts and try to gain value from the visitors.

Adsense would be an easy option to compensate the extra hosting bills. Plus tons of other value from visitors. I really want to hear why you think 99% of the traffic is wrong and has no value.

[RobertFisher]

Cole,

I think if there were a little more detail it would help, but I do understand the hosts point of view given the gradient of the increase. But, if you can avoid it, do not let a host (that is not your dev company, sem/seo company, etc. into your .htaccess file unless you are highly trusting of them). I have security issues.

If the hosting company is using non dedicated servers for you and their other clients (highly likely) then what they are doing is simply reselling the hosting and they are under fire from GoDaddy, BlueHost, NS, etc. for the spike. But, I would really want to see the agreement you have with them as well as, taking your site down for a traffic spike is a big deal unless they know you are doing something nefarious. As to a WP site "handling" 17K visits a day, it will. The issue is a bandwidth on the other end issue.

So, why is Pinterest a problem is a real curiosity. I could see something like an infographic that is more general could get a lot of traffic to you, but not be your customer. And, while I think John is not unreasonable about Adsense, etc., it is not something I would do as an agency or for any of our properties. (again just a philosophy). But, is there anything you can do with the traffic? Can you get them to like or share something, tweet, G+ with you, etc.? I understand that the traffic is not actually valueless, but not your customer and, possibly, a distraction.

I do like that piece of Pinterest and have seen Pinterest be a really nice social tool.

Hope this was at least helpful in some small way,

Robert

[Imperi]

Hi there Robert,

Thanks for your response.

The client does not have the $$ to switch to dedicated hosting, nor do they want to, hence the decisions made.

Part of the issue is now, they have 1,000s (literally!) of pins with this excerpt from their blog post, but there's no way to really go back and contact the pinners. (The client started, but Pinterest offered up a warning window saying their activity was self promotional and not allowed.) They were saying something like "Hi NAME, thanks so much for linking to us! We have other resources here (URL) if you are interested and our Facebook page is here (URL.)" They stripped out the URLs to try again, but got another spam warning.

The client can not advertise through AdSense or another 3rd party due to guidelines they follow from their professional associations.

Another aside: the Featured Content Gallery plugin on the homepage was causing some major issues with the onslaught of traffic. I'm not sure if this is from 1,000s of people accessing the homepage at once or what. I do know this hosting company owns its own servers and is not a reseller.

This is probably just one of those things, but just wanted to see if any negative repercussions would come from Pinterest being blocked in the .htaccess file.

Warmly,

Cole

[Imperi]

Hi John,

Thanks for your post. I see what you are saying, but the reality is the vast majority of the traffic is definitely not the customer. Plus, they do not have $$ in the budget to upgrade hosting and are not allowed to take 3rd party advertising due to their professional guidelines.

If you can provide any insight into whether or not blocking Pinterest from the .htaccess file would cause any negative SEO, let me know.

Warmly,

Cole

[RobertFisher]

Hey Cole,

Just a clarification: I am not saying the client should be on dedicated. We purchase from our provider fully dedicated servers that only our clients or our properties are on. So, if we have server A, it may have just one ecommerce client ,etc. Server B could be our site and 10 client sites. Each of these has no other company on it. So, either us or our clients nothing outside of that. 
With many companies, they are buying monthly hosting from someone like GoDaddy and then simply marking it up. So they have 50 clients hosted all over GoDaddy, but not on a single or two servers.

By keeping all "in the house" we know that there is nothing inappropriate going on.

All the best,

Good question BTW