SEO by Takeshi Young

Pinterest Links Dofollow Again?

UPDATE: As of November 15, 2013 Pinterest links appear to be nofollow again

So I was going through backlinks today using Open Site Explorer’s “Just-Discovered” feature (which is handy for finding newly found links), and I noticed that there were a lot of Pinterest links in there. What’s more, these links were all dofollow.

When Pinterest first launched, all links from the site were dofollow, but nofollow was added to all outbound links early last January. I haven’t heard anything about Pinterest links since then (possibly because I’m news-deprived since Google Reader went away), but it looks like Pinterest does have dofollow links again.

To find the links, just go to any pin in Pinterest, and examine the “Website” button at the top, and you’ll see that it’s a dofollow link.

Pinterest Dofollow Link

There are no meta nofollow tags either, and the pins are not blocked by robots.txt. So it appears that Pinterest links are dofollow again! I’m not sure if this a temporary bug or an actual feature, but for now we can enjoy some link juice goodness from Pinterest again. Time to build up my Pinterest profile.

25 thoughts on “Pinterest Links Dofollow Again?”

  1. Good news for us!
    I’m doing research to see the benefits of using Pinterest for SEO, and your article has helped, thank you.

    1. Hi Darren – did you come up with anything interesting about Pinterest and SEO? I’d like to dig deeper into that and thought you’re findings could be usefull… if you want to share 🙂

      Kind regards,
      Nana

  4. Thanks for the insight.
    Congratulation for this post and for the post in Moz 😉
    I got here from there btw.

    Here in Brazil this is a huge oportunity, i didn’t see anyone using yet Tumblr or Pintrest in the strategy.

  5. That’s great, although I’m still unsure of the exact SEO benefits gained through a link from Pinterest. I wish more big sites would follow in the same footsteps.

    1. Since the links are dofollow, they do pass link juice, which can be helpful if you have a big following on Pinterest and your Pinterest profile has high PageRank. Beyond that, it can help with the crawling and indexation of the content that you pin.

  6. Takeshi, nice post. When I checked a pin in my Pinterest account this morning, it appears the links are nofollow as verified by using the Moz Chrome plugin to highlight nowfollow.

    In my view, Pinterest pins still offer a strong value in terms of branding, reach, referral traffic and perhaps most important, as a potential social signal to Google and other search engines. Thanks for sharing.

      1. Thanks for the update, was about to say the same thing. Maybe you could leave a note on the recent SEO/Tumblr MOZ article that links here.

  8. Excellent post Takeshi!! I think using Pinterest as one of your link building sources is absolutely very effective.

    I have seen many case studies on this recently which confirms that when done properly can provide you with very good links as well as website traffic. I have also conducted a few test and have seen very promising results so I give you a thumbs up for pointing this one out.. Great Post!!!

    1. Yeah!!! after reading some articles about dollow links on pinterest I consider to improve our presence there, but by decenmber 2014, all outbound links are nofollow. Only it´s useful to get trafic from that social media as nollow links

  12. Hey Guys!

    Its back to Dofollow again!

    Its been nofollow for a very long time but now its dofollow for me.

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