Pinterest Link Value

[Tz_Seo]

Hello,

First of all I know that all the links which come from Pinterest are no follow.

However about 4 years ago we made a campaign to pinterest for one of the websites we are managing. Although the thing was going well we had to stop it for various reasons.

Right now, 4 years later, this thing has grown big without any move for us! All these years our pins, which were great in many aspects, were continuously reppined. This has lead to the point where the Google Search Console is reporting that about 500.000 links are linking to our website from Pinterest.

We know how this has helped us or not concerning the actual refferring traffic from Pinterest but our main question, and this where we want the Moz's community help, is how is this helping from a SEO aspect.

Thank you!

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

So, links from social media are not that effective, because search engines know it's social media, anybody can post anything in any amounts. Therefore Google doesn't pay pretty much any attention to such links.

However, social signals do have a lot of value. We have seen a lot of positive changes after good social media campaigns. It's not a secret that Google looks at social media popularity in their rankings. So, yeah, that's how social affects SEO

[brettmandoes]

Google does not use social signals as a ranking signal. It would be far too easy to manipulate rankings, and there's no guarantee of quality.

However, studies have shown a correlation between content that is shared many times and links garnered. You've likely gained quality backlinks thanks to all the repinning on Pinterest, and that has impacted your SEO efforts in a positive manner. And of course, quality referral traffic is always appreciated

[Ria_]

Pinterest links weren't always nofollow, and the links that were created at that time remain to be followed even now. Doesn't really answer your question, but thought it would be worth sharing since description links only went nofollow about 4 years ago.

Unfortunately, editing the followed links results in the link no longer being followed. Tried that. If the image gets repinned, the repin won't be followed either.

[DmitriiK]

Oh, come on.

Does Google use the # of shares or something - of course not. But there is definite correlation between rankings and popularity. Surely not causation, but correlation. The idea is that the more popular content is the more likes, shares etc it will have, which, in turn, will cause getting more links. More links = better rankings.

Maybe I simply formulated it wrong

[Tz_Seo]

Hello Dmitrii,

I will agree with you but the case with this website is raising to us a couple of more serious questions which I did not mention. This website was severely hit by penguin 1. It lost many positions, many #1 positions and throw it to ranking to page #2 or #3. However due to the mid to low importance for the certain website by the owner no actions were taken toward regaining the positions or refreshing the link profile.

So the only difference between the 2012 link profile which led to the penguin punishment and the 2017 link profile which led to recovery, not a full one though, is those 500K+ pinterest links. To be honest we haven't made any thorough research on the case of collateral link gaining caused by pinterest but in general terms no further links were added.

This is what is making us having second thoughts about the actual value of the social media links.

[DmitriiK]

I'd say that it's due to collateral links and, as Ria is saying below, Pinterest might still have dofollow links from the past. Another thing to consider is on-page engagement. Basically, if there are a lot of links and people loving the content, they would be clicking to the website, and, if the content on the website is equally good or better, engagement metrics (time on page, bounce rate etc), will be good as well. And we do know that engagement is one of the ranking factors.

[Tz_Seo]

You're right. We checked the thing in detail and in fact there are a lot of collateral follow links created from certain viral pins.

No mystery after all!

[DmitriiK]

Lol. Sherlock to the rescue!