Monday, July 23, 2012

Search Engine Ranking Studies

Here we show the effectiveness of Pinterest's negative search engine optimization on website rankings. In the examples, we have chosen websites that contain Pinterest topics within, and are known to have some of their content pinned on Pinterest.

we are querying
"domain.com pinterest"
with the expectation that pages on domain.com with articles about Pinterest will receive priority on the result page, and that Pinterest (being devoid of its .com attribute in the query) pages with infringing content from "domain.com" will come in further down the search engine result page.

Case #1: istockphoto.com
The first TWO results are rightly from istockphoto.com, but Pinterest hogs 4 of the results on the first page of search engine results



Case #2: mansurovs.com
Mansurovs.com is a photography site that has a very popular and well-ranking post against Pinterest. The first TWO results on the page are actually on mansurovs, positions 3 and 4 nipping at its heels contain images pinned from mansurovs.



Case #3: Redbubble.com
Rebubble.com is a POD site with many images on Pinterest, and with a large thread about Pinterest within its forum. When searching for the specific domain name "redbubble.com" along with the topic "pinterest" we get an intriguing order of results. The top EIGHT results belong to the Pinterest.com domain name, and only the ninth result is actually on "redbubble.com." That's quite lopsided given that the query contains a TLD (the .com part) for redbubble, but not for Pinterest.



Of course, one could force the search engine to prioritize results from redbubble.com using the site: command, but most people aren't aware of the finer points of query syntax.

Case #3: Tumblr.com
Tumblr.com is largely an image blogging site with many pictures on Pinterest, has a blog tag for pinterest. The first FIVE results on the page are on Pinterest, and only position 6 and 7 are on Tumblr.com itself.



Case #5: Gettyimages.com
Gettyimages.com is the website of a venerable photo agency well known for aggressive defense of copyright. It has many pages on its site and blog mentioning Pinterest. The first FOUR results belong to Pinterest, and the gettyimages.com website's pages about Pinterest is dead last on the page.



CONCLUSION: Combining "domain.com" and "pinterest" in a search query, one may have a reasonable expectation that pages on "domain.com" about Pinterest would come BEFORE pages on Pinterest with infringing content from "domain.com," this is definitely not always the case, even with prominent websites.

3 comments:

Libby said...

Well as I stated last week, links directly to pinterest reared their ugly heads on general searches for household products. And as I said it took me a half hour to find the source if the item I was after.

In the end, crap like this will only alienate real buyers. I have no desire to wade through dozens of Pinhags' accounts to find what I'm looking for.

A Glass Artist said...

I agree! I hope Google notices and turns the dial down on Pinterest. Their effective negative SEO techniques are really muddying up the results.

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