Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack • Hacker News Board

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#51

Post by ryanb » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #23

blinding-streak wrote: post #10

There are certain sites like Wikipedia that improve the web's utility for all who use it, small and giant companies alike. Google search is improved by Wikipedia's existence. And then there are sites like Pinterest, that degrade the web's utility for the vast majority of people on Earth. It actually harms Google's search experience (obviously image search) and frustrates us that try to benignly browse images. Why doe…

An obvious question: does Pinterest buy a lot of Google's ad services?

Post author here.

Answer: Yes

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#52

Post by coding123 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

panpanna wrote: post #25

Androider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably look at the metrics and see that a lot of people are going to the Pinterest results. That the results are garbage and undermine the Google images search experience is much harder to measure.

Welcome to the future. Everything is decided by AI based on data we don't really understand.

If only there was a way to track the number of seconds they spent on pinterest until the back button was hit and... factor that in as a feature in ML. voila.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#53

Post by ryanb » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

panpanna wrote: post #25

Androider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably look at the metrics and see that a lot of people are going to the Pinterest results. That the results are garbage and undermine the Google images search experience is much harder to measure.

Welcome to the future. Everything is decided by AI based on data we don't really understand.

This answer is super spot on, and this will be the story of our lives for a while.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#54

Post by alpha_squared » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

This is fascinating in a potentially terrible way. In summary: when an image is posted, a reverse-image search is done and top results are scraped then added to a "More like this" section for the post. This ranks highly because it's exactly what Google already associates with that image, except now all in one page instead of across multiple pages.

Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video posts) would, presumably, also work. The terrible part of all this, is that it would create more junk posts ranking higher and stratifying the word association of that content with the respective search terms. New content could end up having zero chance of ever ranking highly because another factor of result ranking is content age (older content is weighted heavier).

Am I understanding all that correctly?

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#55

Post by hysan » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

ryanb wrote: post #2

Hey folks, I'm the author here and CEO of RankScience (YC W17). AMA about this growth hack or SEO in general!

I just started a new job where the company is heavily invested into SEO. Being new to the subject, what resources would you suggest for a webdev to first learn the technical fundamentals and then to get deep into the weeds?

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#56

Post by jwegan » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#57

Post by boto3 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

To me the most interesting bit in the article is they managed to scrape Google results at scale.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#58

Post by stevesearer » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

Pinterest does a lot of SEO stuff that is interesting.

For one of my boards that ranks #1 in Google 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.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#59

Post by treis » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #56

Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.

Do you scrape information from any site?

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#60

Post by bberenberg » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #56

Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.

Are you aware of anyone who is not financially incentivized by Pinterests success that thinks your practices are acceptable?