> "If so, it's the greatest SEO scam of all time."
Pretty much.
Hopefully Google will fix the bugs that allow search results to be ruined by Pinterest spam.
Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
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Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#92This 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…
> Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video posts) would, presumably, also work.
I believe reddit started recently doing something like this for text and as a result has made google searching for reddit posts essentially useless.
Basically when you view any post/thread while logged out there are a bunch of other threads shown on the page that have related text, with all the text of their posts included collapsed in the HTML.
The result is that when you search for the context of any reddit post you get hundreds of results which on vaguely similar topics which don't contain the post that you're looking for (unless you log out and count hidden text collapsed under other threads).
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#93Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.
Thank you for trying. Pinterest really makes google image search a lot less useful.
Almost every time I use GIS there is an initial stage of "Fck I forgot to add -site:pinterest.".
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#94This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it doesn't seem to be backed by any evidence, either in the original Twitter thread nor the linked blog post.
I think far more likely what's happening is Pinterest is actively crawling the web for images and surrounding text. They will then perform their own reverse image search on _their own_ database, and add this context text to their existing copy of the image, or create a new one if one is not present.
Why would they rely on a user submitting a picture then go to the trouble of reverse searching it? I think they are much more proactive than that.
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#95Hey, 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.
I have two questions for you then. First, if you insist that you have not scraped data then can you offer an alternative explanation for the data being presented here? Second, it's pretty clear that the majority of at least the tech community hates what you do with the regwall. Do you not know how bad your site's behavior makes GIS for those of us who aren't interested in joining it? Or do you just not care?
I think my comment presents a far more likely scenario than scraping Google search results.
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#96Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.
The same recommendation (add -site:pinterest.com) has 77k upvotes in r/LifeProTips
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe...
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#97Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.
Yeah I don’t get it. Panda was supposed to clean up results - and it did for a while. Seems priorities changed. Kinda makes me wonder if someone higher up at Google is invested in Pinterest.
Panda was lead by Amit Singhal who was very serious about search relevance. He was kicked out for his sexual behavior though (and also because the leadership wanted to go towards more complex machine learning, while Amit believed in the more explainable models at that time).
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#98This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it doesn't seem to be backed by any evidence, either in the original Twitter thread nor the linked blog post. I think far more likely what's happening is Pinterest is actively crawling the web for images and surrounding text. They will then perform their own reverse image search on _their own_ database, and add this context text to their existing copy of the image, or creat…
A lot of business accounts sign up to activate Rich Pins which adds a few additional features when people pin from you site.
When you are signed up for this they will scrape the page the pinned image comes from to collect some extra info on the page to show along with the pin.
I’m not sure how if they do this if you are not signed up for Rich Pins though.
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#99Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.
I run a plugin in Chrome that does that automatically for image searches. The pinterest results are pure trash and never provide me with what I'm looking for, but take up an excessive quantity of results for every search.
Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
#100Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.
I wish we could do the same for Shutterstock and all these useless stock image websites that have totally hacked Google image search yet Google won't do anything about them for some reason.
Those are really helpful for making memes though.