Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

There's no intentional or manual effort at Google to promote pinterest.

Pinterest shows up because they understand how the Google algorithm works and built their website to display all the signals that Google looks for in relevant image content.

They understand user intent and generate URLs that present content in a way that google expects to see.

Examples of how they do this from their engineering team:

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/demystifying-seo-wi...

More:

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/tagged/seo

Related: in the last several years, there started appearing these StackOverflow mirrors. It's gotten to the point that you can't google a programming question without running into at least one. Some copy the questions and answers verbatim, some use machine translation to (crappily) translate them into my native language. Sometimes they even rank higher than the real StackOverflow.

I really wish there was a non-hacky way to ban sites from Google search results. I also feel like Google's ranking algorithm is utterly broken since it's amenable to this kind of exploitation.

One big reason why Pinterest ranks so highly, and why you are seeing different tld's in the results, is because they have a variety of tld's that they use and those tld's all have separate crawl budgets from each other. So Google crawls Pinterest about an order of magnitude more than most other sites. You can read more about this here: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/how-switching-our-d...

Source: I run a think tank focused on Google’s web crawling advantage and have been studying stuff like this for a couple years now.

Some relevant prior discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21622322 (Nov 2019) "Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results" 1000+ upvotes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996 (Mar 2018) “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO” 1100+ upvotes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16388833 (Feb 2018)

And many more: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])

  google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

Add to uBlock Origin. in the "My Filters" tab. This will completely block pinterest

Pinterest spends a large percentage of their budget on gaming the search page.

Though I’m sure you’ve noticed in recent years that Google has begun to replace many search results with answers directly from them instead of redirecting you to places like Pinterest. For the better I say. Companies like Pinterest are parasitic and degrade the overall ecosystem of search.

I heard there was some incestual stuff at medium-high levels of relevant google org/teams and pinterest in terms of people moving between the companies and being friends/favors. Also that these specific teams at google are mediocre at best now and all the good engineers and product focused people have moved on to greener pastures. Probably why google image search has stagnated hard (I find bing and yandex out perform it easily depending on your searches).

The explanation that Pinterest is just "good at SEO" never made sense to me because at their scale someone at google obviously would notice and could decide to counter their SEO tricks etc (google has never had problem with doing this before).

Not to sound conspiratorial but from what I know I find it more plasubile that mid level decision makers at google can block any change that would nuke pinterest because they or their social circle have personal interest in keeping pinterest up while issue is not close to big enough or impacting larger revenue to attract attention from above.

This answer has never made sense to me. Pinterest breaks the 2 signals I would assume Google search to use:

1. Often, the image I'm looking for isn't the main image on the page, just one of the small thumbnails and very hard to find on the page

2. Almost every single time I click on a pinterest result, I end up going back because it doesn't help me, i assume others do the same.

It should violate the duplicate content guideline, since 100% of Pinterest content is not original and lifted from another website.

Then again G also ranks those Markov-generated "blogs" with nonsensical text, not sure what to call them but you've seen them. It seems SEO is still alive and well despite all the claims of its death.

Certainly worth mentioning the WP article from October that highlights Google search's deterioration only in the last few years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-... "How does Google’s monopoly hurt you? Try these searches. Right under our noses, the Internet’s most-used website has been getting worse"

Yeah, sure, Pinterest knows how to game the results. But the rules of the "game" are in Google's control, so... I hope we don't normalize a deterioriation of a valuable resource under some neutral-sounding algorithmic play.

I feel like pinterest is being a "placeholder"/"fallback"/"default" of the web. Each time I encounter quora or pinterest search results I am getting the feeling I was looking for something that does not have good online answer/content.

“Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack”

https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...

Pinterest is very good at SEO and does some things that I have found to be quite interesting.

I posted this before in another post a while ago, but it is still relevant:

“For one of my boards that ranks #1 in Google on some searches I've found that the page Google indexes is quite a bit different than the one I see as a logged-in user.

One of the differences is that they display the text content associated with the pin. This is also used as the image alt text, but then appended with a bunch of keywords.

They also link to other people's boards which have names related to the images so it looks like "tags", but I have the feeling it is probably a mix of keyword stuffing/linking to other content for Google to follow.

The page title is also adjusted to include something like, "237 Best ________ images in 2020" followed by the board name.”

I search lot of academic suff like medicine and programing.

Sometimes I search for image results, and my search results are polluted by SlideShare and Slide player

SidePlayer is an ad infested site which also pirate PDFs by crawling for open PDFs and automatically uploading to their website

I don't understand why Google gives priority to such websites.

I believe including pinterest and sites like SlideShare and Slide player in our search results is what google should allow us to opt in not something we should opt out

Pinterest search results are so frustrating. There's a page that's close to what I want - but I can't get to the text ... I don't want a picture, I want to read a document. Seems like something is off, cuz it's crowding out sites with real content.

Another example about how google is broken. It has great difficulty distinguishing noise from signal.

Pintrest has the worst UI/UX of any website. It is a cancer of the internet, contributes nothing and allows re-aggregation and front-running in Google search as a feature. It baffles me why people use this piece of shit.

I often check my images to see how well there are appearing in the google search. Many times I have found to my delight one of my images clicked on it only to find it leads to another picture on Pinterest and is a completely different product and no link to me or my artwork or product. It is very upsetting that original source takes second place to third parties and these pins are vanishing and being replaced. I have no idea how they are doing this but it is making using Pinterest to show my original art and work a place to consider complete withdrawing from.

I solved this nonsense by installing a plugin in chrome that automatically adds -site:pinterest.* to all searches. Almost living in bliss ever since.

For two reasons:

1. When people see a search result from Pinterest, they tend to click on it more than on the results from competing publishers.

2. After they click on it, they tend to engage with the content more than they do with the content from other publishers.

This is not specific to Pinterest, it's how modern SEO works. You'll notice that Pinterest doesn't dominate every search result in the world, but predominantly the ones where the user's search intent is more aligned with Pinterest's strengths (product discovery, visual stimulation, pet/animal pictures, art direction, etc.).

I think what people find confusing is how can Pinterest compete with other search results that have far more text? Well, it's not about the amount of text at all, it's about satisfying the search intent. And when someone types in: "what should I wear for my wedding," images are better in answering that question than text (a picture is worth...). As Pinterest's success in SEO teaches us, there are many more similar instances than we would have expected.

If Google decided tomorrow that Quora and Pinterest is spam and should basically never be in the top 10 results pages, couldn’t they just fix it? What’s the worst that could happen?

John Muller (from Google) says about Pinterest:

I'd argue there's a lot of content on Pinterest -- even if it's not a collection of 3000 word blog posts. Sometimes images, even with minimal textual content, can be exactly what people are looking for. Not always, and sometimes we get it wrong, but it's certainly an option.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1260171380580024320

========= Regarding Pinterest, while I'm personally not a user of the site, there is a ton of content there. It's not 3000 word articles, but you don't need that for search anyway.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1316668506918866944

And the Pinterest pages have no content! They've beaten Google or Google doesn't care anymore, either way, plummeting result quality is a strong signal that Google Search is ripe for disruption. Ten years ago, Google would've punished all Pinterest properties for this.

I do not know whether Google gives Pinterest preferential treatment. That said, I'd like to know: What are you searching? Results will be different depending on if you're searching "cute bedroom ideas" or "epistemology in pre-Socratic Greece."

i specifically hate how they hack slap a login wall on images, and dont allow you to right-click+save on mobile. they're intent on breaking the mobile web for their own self interest.

if you're going to SEO yourself to the top of google, good for you, but please dont use google as non-optional lead capture for your app that I don't want.

I’d love to be able to block a domain from showing up in my search results.

Pinterest being an obvious offender, but I can imagine people wanting to block certain news sites, or Fandom/Wikia sites, or all sorts of link farm spam sites.

I still remembered Google Panda update in 2011, destroyed many low effort SEO farms.

I wonder why Google stopped fighting this good fight anymore.

There’s a great Chrome extension that will remove those from search results.

My girlfriend and I watched Interstellar the other night. She had a few questions at the end and I remembered there being some great infographics that would help explain. So I reached for Google Image Search and the results were dominated by Pinterest. It wouldn't have been so bad if I could've viewed the original full-size image - but for that I would've needed to create a Pinterest account which I absolutely didn't want to do. After that I gave up and drew my own with pen and paper.

I occasionally do copyright searches for owners of images (it's a thing in online groups where "do not post images without permission" is a thing) pinterest is full black hat when it comes to image ownership. It owns nothing it has on its site and without an account, there's no way to trace ownership using its links. And usually there's so many duplicates of the same images (without credit) that it swamps all search results.

Nice timing on this question - I'm actually deconstructing a website mockup (PDF) this morning and needing to find the originals of the images the graphic designer (who is off on holidays) used. It's not just the dozens of Pinterest copies, but even Medium or private blogs that are using an image and still ranking higher.

I find it disappointing that Google doesn't apply more authority to sites like Unsplash when it is clearing the original source.

Google hasn't returned the best results for years. They return the results someone paid to put there. Either through direct paid ads or through heavily SEM/SEO influenced results for everything except the most esoteric topics.

We actually ended up having to do defensive SEM/SEO on bing simply because of how cheap it is to game results there, just because they're not google (no one does it except scammers and people addressing scammers).

Just wanted to come here to agree. I blacklisted pinterest (and some other garbage content with forced registration for the purpose of data collection, like Quora) long time ago using a browser extension. It is particularly annoying when searching for images. I never clicked on pinterest either and wonder why Google is still showing me these results.

I wish they would natively allow blacklisting specific domains.

If Pinterest is one of your main competitors for search engine results there’s a good chance you’ve clicked on them plenty of times to check out what they’re doing. Google is going to personalise your results on that and they will think you like Pinterest. I personally practically never see them as a result.

Been a while since I’ve done any seo but iirc there are tools you can use to try to get the most objective serps.

For people saying Pinterest has mastered SEO and that's why they're at the top, what exactly are they doing that is so effective?

I'm not understanding how individual Pinterest pages or users would gather that many quality backlinks for example. Do they have quality backlinks? If not, why is lack of backlinks not hurting their rankings?

Could you please post some examples of search queries (text or image) that are dominated by Pinterest?

I share the sentiment in other comments that search engines are (deliberately?) allowing SEO abusers to degrade the user's experience. I noticed that for some queries (Like "How to brush teeth"), there are more ads on the first page than results! They're marked, but not in an immediately-visible way; I'd be most people integrate them with search results mentally.

I started throwing together a search engine about a week ago to address these concerns, and put it online yesterday. (https://www.pageref.org). I'm deliberately penalizing SEO abusers, and promoting websites that have high-quality content. Running custom searches on these sites in some cases based on keyword.

In a lot of cases, I'm throwing in search queries, and going through each result one at a time, and categorizing them; eg penalizing sites that use clickbait or scammy ads, that are low-quality but show up high in results etc, or probably aren't relevant, but are highly SEO optimized, like Pinterest.

How much of the bafflement stems from the fact that Pinterest's own audience is overwhelmingly women, while the general search audience is 50/50 and the HN audience is, judging by the character of the comments, 99% men?

FWIW I use a greasemonkey script called "google hit hider by Domain". I used it to manually permaban all pinterest domains when they appear and now I almost never see a single pinterest result in my searches.

You can add:

  -site:pinterest.com

to your search to exclude pinterest.

Should be pretty simple to make a browser addin that adds “-pinterest” to search queries (I very often add that and search again, if I get a Pinterest result at the top).

Is there a ddg bang for search without returning Pinterest? (I mean I think -pinterest should work but maybe fewer characters, and I’m not even sure “-“ works anymore.

I am curious how your site accounts for different screens representing colors differently. It seems like it would be a hard problem to solve for this use case.

Wondered the same about Amazon as well. They show up first for most products.

Are those organic results? Or do they have a kickass SEO team that games Google’s algorithm.

Google has been rewarding a lot of the top sites that have the highest trust and authority lately. Pinterest being one of them.

This has been going on for a while now.

It does dominate image search which sucks. I instinctively add "-pinterest" to my search. I don't have this problem on text search.

This complaint features regularly on HN so [my assumption] it has to be wilful blindness on the part of google?

I always thought Pinterest was Google's site and that's why it was coming up so often.

I strongly dislike pinterest for this very reason. I wish I could block it from search results

Why does Google let Pinterest dominate their results?

For me this is an instance of Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." :) I very rarely see Pinterest in my search results.

Are we using different googles?

You can search with adding `-pinterest` to remove all that noise.

Well, Google and Bing do favor big or older/established websites. And Google's search is trying to be smart when it clearly isn't.

I'm getting sick of my searches being "corrected", sometimes they even ignore the quotes.

Facebook users are linking a lot to Pinterest

I can't think of the last time I did a search and got any pinterest pages in my results. It must be more a factor of what you search for.

I read the question as follows: how to rank so high like Pinterest does?

The answer is: you should not spend any second on SEO. It is time and money wasted if you are a SMB. Anything else, including taking a walk is better for your business than going into SEO optimization.

Your clients are people who buy your stuff. Search engine robot is not your client. After years of working with SEO it becomes clear for me, if you satisfy a robot, you don't satisfy your client. These are two different things.

The bright side is that when you will serve your clients, robots will catch up eventually. But it is search engine problem not something you should spend time on.

There is no magic bullet method to rank high. No special hack you can use. Everything you will read about SEO is smokes and mirrors. If you have million dollar company and did everything else right - sure, you can throw hundreds thousands dollars into SEO and pray search engine devs won't change their minds.

But as a SMB company, counting each dollar, just leave it. You won't win over search engines and people with bulk of money.

Spend your time and effort on clients. It is the only way to spend it right. If search engine will change mind - so be it. You won't be dependant on it. And your clients will come to you because they love your product, it is stronger than being number one in a twisted search ranking.