[dougunplugged]

What John says in this post about "Pinterest as a source of inbound links" is false. Pinterest uses rel="nofollow" on external links, which severs any value the links have for SEO.

For example:

Pin collection page: <a class="GestaltTouchableFocus" href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/83131400/ornaments-pine-cone-gn..." rel="nofollow"

Pin detail page: <a class="linkModuleActionButton" href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/83131400/ornaments-pine-cone-gn..." rel="nofollow">

You aren't going to improve your SEO by being on Pinterest, at least by getting links from Pinterest. It's possible someone else sees your site from browsing Pinterest and then links to it from their site.

[ayewo]

“What John says in this post about "Pinterest as a source of inbound links" is false. Pinterest uses rel="nofollow" on external links, which severs any value the links have for SEO.”

I almost didn’t read the article when I saw your comment, but I’m glad I did.

You’ve misunderstood what he said. There are two ways to parse the quote you claim is false.

1. "Pinterest as a source of inbound links [that enhance of your site’s rank on Google]"

2. "Pinterest as a source of inbound links [that delivers valuable traffic from a highly visible site like Pinterest]"

The 1st interpretation is easy to arrive at if you are reading the article with a how do I improve my rank on the SERP?, aka SEO mindset. This interpretation cares about improving domain authority.

The 2nd interpretation comes from a growth marketing mindset. Essentially, it seeks to answer a different question: how do I grow my referral traffic using well-placed pins on a high traffic site like Pinterest? This interpretation doesn’t care about domain authority, it cares about delivering more referral traffic to your website, increasing the likelihood of some of them converting into paying customers.

The article was clearly about the 2nd as is clearly evident from the last sentence of the section where the quote was lifted from:

“So, getting good at Pinterest doesn’t just help improve your Pinterest referral traffic, it can also improve your traffic from places like Google!”

This was an excellent article!

[bserge]

Last time I was into SEO, the big "experts" seemed to agree that even nofollow links are useful for ranking. Now I'm not sure if it was just more bullshit (the industry is full of it), although it makes sense that with how widespread nofollow is these days, Google might have no choice but to take them into account. Otherwise they'd have to ignore like half the Web.

[rchaud]

That's correct. If Google treated every Twitter/FB/Reddit link as useless just because those sites attach 'nofollow' to every external link, it would have a much worse idea of what links are relevant and what's not.

Nofollow is still useful for site owners that are using it as intended, and not as a site-wide policy. It's just that most sites do not get a fraction of the traffic a big tweet or Reddit post would get.

[ricardo81]

Nowadays Google claim that nofollow is subject to their interpretation of whether it counts as a citation or not, whereas previously they claimed it invariably did not count. As another poster mentioned, the conventional wisdom is that they always did count for something.

Google realises the link graph has been decimated by people trying to sculpt Pagerank-esque ranking factors and that a larger part of it is/was using nofollow.