Pinterest and Link Juice

[Greatmats]

I can't understand why our Pinterest boards don't show up as external links (nor do our YouTube videos).  However, one of our competitor's Pinterest boards is in the top ten as far as their external links go.

Clues?

[KeriMorgret]

Is this in OSE, or somewhere else? OSE doesn't index all of the web, so it could be that we just didn't index those particular links.

[EGOL]

I see thousands of pinterest links as backlinks in Webmaster Tools.

[Highland]

I don't know that Pinterest links should show up. All Pinterest links are nofollow. More importantly, it's hard to truly index Pinterest because of how it's structured. I'm amazed WMT shows Pinterest links at all (#2 source of links in WMT for us) considering I show none for FB and Twitter.

Can you post the competitor and where you're seeing Pinterest show up like that? Would like to know myself (WMT offers no other stats)

[Greatmats]

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?no_redirect=1&page=1&site=matsinc.com%2F

Maybe I'm missing something?

[Highland]

Interesting. I dug through my own and found Pinterest links too. OSE only shows 2 links, tho (and one is broken).

Interestingly, I was wrong. Pinterest links are indeed dofollow links.

[EGOL]

Some of mine are dofollow and some are nofollow.

I don't know why they are split this way.

[smsinc]

Any new information on this? I have a client in the same boat -- their link analysis doesn't include pinterest as a linking domain but their competitor's analysis does. I'm having a difficult time explaining this to my client. Any clues?

[EGOL]

Don't bet on anything.

Pintrest can follow or nofollow at whim.  Google can honor them or ignore them at whim.  What they do now and what they do in the future can be changed without tellin' you.   (There are four combinations here... that means that you got a 25% chance of bein' what you want.)

If you are going after these it gotta make sense for reasons of traffic and exposure....

Honestly, most people who see your images there don't know you made 'em and aren't coming to your website.  And most of the people who do see your image and come to your website are not buyin' anything - they are just interested in stealin' more of your images.

Pinterest is a valuable strategy for a very small number of websites. Everybody else has been fooled.

[KeriMorgret]

Check out GWT and the links should be showing there. Google's got just a slightly bigger server farm than we have, and is able to crawl more of the web. Let your client know that while it's great for OSE to see the links and for the links to be counted in the score we give, your real goal is to have the search engines count those links, and that's what matters. We haven't been able to convince the search engines to ditch their metrics and use ours yet.