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Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack
- ryanb 6y agoHey folks, I'm the author here and CEO of RankScience (YC W17). AMA about this growth hack or SEO in general!
- andreygrehov 6y agoI've got something I've always been curious about. If the website was penalized by Google, is it possible to rank _after_ the penalty is lifted? Edit: the story behind this question. A friend of mine has a local business. He once paid an SEO agency to do optimizations for his website. After a while, the website was penalized because of some shady stuff the agency did (paid links?). The penalty is long gone, but it looks like Google never forgets anything, so the website is sitting there on 5+ pages for pretty much any keyword.
- ryanb 6y agoYep, this is called a "manual action" by Google, and they'll often tell you exactly what you're doing that they find offensive. Usually this involves buying spammy backlinks. You can resolve the issue and ask them to re-evaluate your site by submitting a Reconsideration request. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
- ngold 6y agoGood stuff. Tell us more googly stories of interest. This is super fascinating.
- ryanb 6y agoEngagement on links clicked in Gmail is likely a ranking factor in Google search. We've done studies with popular e-mail newsletters that showed URLs performing better in search on days when they've been sent out to hundreds of thousands of people.
- airstrike 6y ago"Growth hack" sounds so benign when this is really tantamount to spam
- skymt 6y ago"Growth hack" is an industry euphemism for "unethical practice." You can tell it doesn't literally mean "growth hack" because it's being applied here to the website that Alexa currently ranks #152 worldwide and the typical excuses about how you need to get a little dirty when you're a tiny business just getting started don't remotely hold water.
- ponker 6y agoNot all growth hacking is unethical. WePay's $100 bills in a big block of ice dropped off at the PayPal conference comes to mind. Or Dropbox giving you extra free quota for going through their tutorial, installing on a new device, or inviting a friend (where the friend also gets extra free quota).
- thewebcount 6y agoI don't about the other ones, but giving you extra when you get someone else to join is unethical. MCI started this trend with their "friends and family" promotion, and it really pissed people off. People who don't use the system hate being pestered by friends and family to join something they don't want or need.
- paulcole 6y agoThis is classic HN. MARKETING BAD! ENGINEER GOOD!
- cj 6y agoIn your opinion, is this a growth hack you'd suggest one of your customers try? Or does it cross a line in your opinion? "SEO Optimization" is difficult because it's such an imperfect science (or perhaps not, based on your company name!) What are a couple examples or anecdotes of SEO "hacks" / optimizations that are least obvious or things most people wouldn't think of, that have had the most significant impact on SEO?
- ryanb 6y agoI think it crosses the line and I'm surprised Google hasn't issue them a warning, or maybe they have and we just haven't heard about it. Organic search is still where 80% of the clicks are in search. (only 20% go to paid - though this is changing) These are easy wins and are considered "white hat" and legitimate tactics: * Title tag optimization with SEO A/B testing - increase CTR from Google by 10-40% * Using NLP Content Optimization to increase content relevancy * Optimize internal linking structure of your site so Google can easily understand your site hierarchy and spread value to important pages * Build natural backlinks by creating interesting content that people want to engage with and link to (like this post!) https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test
- RubenvanE 6y agoSEO ‘hacking’ is clearly positive for the businesses doing it, but the benefits on a larger scale are less clear cut. Do you believe strategies such as outlined in the article are a net positive, negative, or a neutral tactic for search engines and the web at large?
- ryanb 6y agoAt the end of the day, Google is a private company. They get to set the rules and police search results how they see fit. I don't think Pinterest is doing anything unethical. I do think it is spammy, though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hysan 6y agoI 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?
- smcameron 6y agoBack 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.
- ryanb 6y agoSuper interesting. A lot of people feel the same way. Why do you think you weren't able to get any traction for this?
- Androider 6y agoThey 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.
- baxtr 6y agoBut isn’t this a sign that it’s actually useful for people? At the same time I have to admit that google image search is probably their worst vertical.
- Tostino 6y agoI'd say it's more of a sign of what shows up highest in their index rather than any indication on the quality.
- Spivak 6y agoIf people are actually navigating to the results and not bouncing immediately due to the login wall that is a sign that people are finding them useful. Is it that weird to believe that lots of people have Pinterest logins?
- 6y ago
- kristopolous 6y agoThey speak so positively about flooding the internet with useless garbage results
- blinding-streak 6y agoThere 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 does Google let Pinterest get away with its user-hostile approach?
- nine_k 6y agoAn obvious question: does Pinterest buy a lot of Google's ad services?
- foobarian 6y agoAnother obvious question: does Google pay for the valuable free content they get from Wikipedia?
- fheld 6y agoNot an answer but a data point: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-million-to-wikipedias-parent-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
- dspillett 6y agoAny chance of a summary for those who refuse to play TC/Yahoo's privacy game (which last time I did look in more depth made it pretty much impossible to completely opt out of tracking) beyond seeing the interstitial and hitting back?
- nine_k 6y agoDoes an incognito browser window help?
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- arkanciscan 6y agoLong time Pinterest user here with a different perspective; back around 2016 there was a serious problem with duplicate images on Pinterest. You couldn't search for the word "bicycle" without seeing the same photo hundreds of times. At some point it got better, and it seemed to me that they were doing some image recognition. It has since gotten MUCH better at suggesting images that are visually similar. So let me get this straight; you guys are mad because Pinterest has done such a good job of labeling and categorizing images that they come up in most Google Image searches? Show me on the doll where it touched you.
- bussierem 6y agoAnd I'm sure that's a very great experience when you have a Pinterest account. For the rest of us it makes half of Google image search useless because we can't view the original site image thanks to not having an account.
- notacoward 6y ago> because Pinterest has done such a good job of labeling and categorizing images No. Nobody cares about the deduplication part. Good for them. And if they used their own users' content to increase search accuracy for their own users, nobody would care either. What people care about is that they're actively seeking out and borrowing non users' content (metadata and descriptions) to trick Google image search and pull in other non users who then can't even see the pictures they clicked for. > Show me on the doll where it touched you. Interesting how such an irrelevant metaphor comes so readily to mind for you, and that you think it's something to joke about. Hint: it's a super bad look for you.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's the opposite of what we're hoping for here. I understand that it's frustrating to be in the minority and represent a contrarian view to an internet forum, but if you don't want to discredit the truth you're arguing for, the only way is to provide correct information and correct errors neutrally. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- solarkraft 6y ago"growth hack" is a great way of saying spam.
- alpha_squared 6y agoThis 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?
- nullc 6y ago> 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).
- specialist 6y ago"...all the text of [the related] posts included collapsed in the HTML" Huh. Facepalm. Is there any way to exclude portions of content from indexing? Like maybe inlining robots directed pragmas: <span data-robots="noindex"> blah blah blah </span> Or using meta tags to spec exclusions: <meta name="robots" content="noindex:.related-posts" /> FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Meta_tags_and_headers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Meta...
- 6y ago
- jwegan 6y agoHey, 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.
- treis 6y agoDo you scrape information from any site?
- bberenberg 6y agoAre you aware of anyone who is not financially incentivized by Pinterests success that thinks your practices are acceptable?
- llacb47 6y agoDo you think it's bad that Pinterest is known as an annoying site? What are you doing about it?
- frandroid 6y ago"We" is the growth team, or all of pinterest?
- wolrah 6y agoI 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?
- notacoward 6y agoI'm guessing that they use one or more third parties that do indeed scrape Google results but provide plausible deniability in the process. And I'd look very closely at the employment histories of principals at those nominal "third" parties. It's not that uncommon in this industry to find companies with exactly one customer, staffed entirely by ex-employees of that one customer.
- boto3 6y agoTo me the most interesting bit in the article is they managed to scrape Google results at scale.
- stevesearer 6y agoPinterest 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.
- xg15 6y agoJust mentioning that Pinterest used to boast on their engineering blog how they designed the non-dismissable nag-screen [1] and how they increased engagement by making their landing pages more confusing [2]. Not surprised they hack their way through search. [1] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-and-increasing-signups-d6e7d8fef479 https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-a... [2] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-engineering-how-we-doubled-sign-ups-from-pin-landing-pages-1c0bc400cdb9 https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-e...
- neotek 6y agoIf that's the stuff they're willing to openly brag about, it makes me wonder what dirtier things they're doing behind closed doors.
- stelonix 6y agoFor some years now, Google Images has been pretty awful to navigate, all thanks to Pinterest. I do hope Google is just unaware of the mentioned "hack", because the other option is they do not care because Pinterest helps them through ads. Note: I have not checked whether Pinterest has Adsense since I use Adblock. I'm going by some of the comments here. A couple of days ago I was trying to find out better image search websites because google removed the feature to find images of an exact size. I was brought to Bing, but it also lacks that feature. It kept me up that night thinking how to make a better service and whether I'd have to scrape Google, which made me think of webcrawlers, site indexing... It's turtles all the way down, I can't imagine a solo developer (or startup) pulling it off. I know there are decentralized search attempts, but anything decentralized simply does not work for 2020. So I ask here on HN, how could a power-user friendly http image search service work without depending on big corps? Is it just impossible and we need to keep praying billionaire CEOs will listen to us or it's simply something no one has done yet?
- mthoms 6y agoThe first problem is monetization. Do you think people would pay a yearly subscription fee for a better image search? I'm not sure they would, but maybe.
- musicale 6y ago> "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.
- mdoms 6y agoThis 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.
- stevesearer 6y agoA 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.
- person_of_color 6y agoPinterest goes in the PiHole.