My pet peeve of the year is people who don’t understand what Pinterest is for. Ever since Pinterest started blowing up, and especially after the word got out that Pinterest is great for SEO, everyone just jumped on the Pinterest button bandwagon; many jumped on without really knowing why.
What was their logic? “Pinterest is popular and I heard it’s good for SEO. I need Pinterest buttons on my site.”
No. You don’t.
It’s Not the Same Thing
Pinterest buttons don’t perform the same action as the other popular Fast Action Social Sharing buttons (FASS Buttons, I’m coining that term right now). See the Google+, Twitter, and Facebook sharing buttons at the top of this post? They share this post (spefically, the URL of this post) to their respective social networks. The benefit is that people who follow you will see that link and click on it, earning you glorious referal traffic. From the SEO side, search engines will also take note of this and, if enough people share a page, SEO value will come of it.
Now what’s different about Pinterest buttons? Pinterest buttons share images, not URLs. When a user clicks a Pinterest button, they aren’t recommending the page they’re on or posting it to their feed; they’re trying to pin (bookmark) a specific image onto one of their Pinterest pinboards. That said, getting your images pinned onto Pinterest is also great for referal traffic and SEO value.
But here’s what my pet peeve of the year is…
Pages with Pinterest Buttons That Don’t Have Images
Just because you heard that Pinterest was the best thing since emoticons doesn’t mean you should throw up Pinterest buttons on every page of your website. Pinterst buttons do not apply to you if:
- You don’t have any in-content images. No one is going to pin the images in your website tempalte.
- Your website is in Flash. It doesn’t matter how pretty that Flash is; Pinterest can’t pull anything from it. End of story.
- 90% of the images in your posts are stock photos. It’s insulting that you’d even pretend users would pin those.
If you have an ecommerce website with product images, you should have Pinterest buttons on your site. If you have a DIY/Craft/Fashion blog, you damn well better have Pinterest buttons all up in that. If you’re a photographer or artist…well, you get the point.
If your website features original and even marginally interesting imagery, it makes sense for you to add in some FASS buttons for Pinterest. If you can’t be bothered to find images to insert into your posts or your website just isn’t conducive to interesting imagery of any kind, then please, do not add Pinterest buttons to your site.
In Conclusion
If you have Pinterest buttons on your site and there aren’t any pinnable images, I hate you:
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