How to Exclude Pinterest From a Google Search

8 min read

So…it looks like you’ve heard the fantastic news: that Pinterest is a great place to promote your awesome ecommerce website, impressive social media accounts, and dazzling products. With over 430 million monthly active users, Pinterest plays a huge role in the entire ecommerce industry.

Pinterest not only inspires new product ideas but also informs buyers and sellers about the market space in general and often ultimately leads to a purchase. But, as Pinterest grows with more people using it to find content, it is more important than ever to manage your online presence.

But, are you curious about why people would want to exclude Pinterest from search results and why people would want to put traffic on a content site versus a social media account?

The answer is pretty straightforward: to maintain control over the way people find content relating to you and your brand: product photos and all.

Therefore, sometimes you may want to exclude Pinterest from the search results for your site. With that, let’s dive right in. In this article, we’ll show you how to exclude Pinterest from any Google search.

Uninterested in Being Pinterest-ed and Appearing in a Google Search

Now, to get a bit technical for a moment, there’s no way “technically” to stop Pinterest content from appearing in Google search results — or from appearing on any search engine. Any content that you or anyone else pins from a website will be indexed by the search engines, even if it’s a paid or copyrighted page. However, there are ways to control the types of content in the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Controlling how google SERPs understand your content means you can have your content rank far into the depths of the internet abyss. The place where all deleted and outdated internet pages go to die.

The first step in this process of “removing” your Pinterest content from Google search is to remove the Pinterest “P” from your web address. So, if your web address is www.pinterest.com/yourusername, then you should change it to www.yourusername.com.

A little tip is to change your Etsy, Facebook, and Instagram URLs to something like shop.yourusername.com or facebook.com/shop.yourusername.

Why Do You Want to Avoid Using the Term Pinterest When Listing Your Links?

The main reason you want to exclude Pinterest in your listings is related to the structure of these sites: they’re usually product-oriented, and if you include Pinterest, people will get confused, and they won’t find your results. This is the most common mistake people make when listing their ecommerce inventory.

You can put all your product listing links on the same page, or on separate product pages. Then, you can include pins on Pinterest directly on your page (i.e., products pages), or you can use the Pinterest pin manager (they offer excellent tools).

This is potentially the most significant benefit of excluding Pinterest from search results. If people do not find your pins on Pinterest, you will avoid all the following problems in one swoop:

Being shown in the organic results
Found from your pins in a search; and
Being found by your pins based on Pinterest’s search parameters.

The Simple Way to Eliminate Pinterest Pins from Populating YOUR searches

But what if you don’t want to search online and have Pinterest products populating your results? A handy tip that will eliminate Pinterest from appearing in a google search if using the search engine to browse the web is this.

Add the following code at the end of your google search:

— Pinterest

Here is an example, if you wanted to research baskets online (excluding Pinterest), you would type into the search:

baskets —Pinterest

Get the Latest Information Before Eliminating Pinterest from Google Searches

Amazon recently bought Pinterest for $3.2 Billion. They intended to take Pinterest in a more social, community-oriented direction. This was mainly due to Pinterest’s inability to collect sales tax on products purchased from their platform.

Following this, Google announced Content Rights Management, also known as Content ID. What this does is it notifies Google websites whenever other websites use content from Pinterest. (subsequently citing these sources in search results for the user)

Therefore, if you decide to opt-out of Pinterest content in Google search, you may also see other results relating to search engine results. A word of caution is that this includes the leaving of unwanted advertisements on your site.

Here is the main point. After Google’s Content ID system was introduced, a number of brands have embraced the importance of protecting their copyrighted images. If you’re one of these brands, chances are you’ve had to battle other spammy companies that are trying to get ahead of you through search engine optimization tactics. So, by implementing a similar system (that Pinterest has in Google Search) brands can effectively upload their content and manage who sees what. (block products on Pinterest from showing up)

There are more complicated ways to prevent Pinterest Pins from populating a search, but they are super unnecessary considering that all you want to do is either.

Not have your Pinterest content appear when someone types into Google Search, or
Not have ANY Pinterest results populate YOUR Google searches.

We should tell you, If you do decide to opt-out of Pinterest content showing up in search results, then you can rest assured that Google will still show your image as displayed on your site through Google Images.

With Ecwid, remember that you can monitor all sales activity from a single user dashboard regardless of the platform. So, whether tracking sales and marketing from your website, Instagram, or Pinterest, the intuitive dashboard will put all the power you need at your fingertips. Check it out today…

There is the scoop. If you’ve found this article helpful, feel free to share it with someone who you think could benefit from excluding Google from their searches.

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Apr 10, 2021

About the author

Max has been working in the ecommerce industry for the last six years helping brands to establish and level-up content marketing and SEO. Despite that, he has experience with entrepreneurship. He is a fiction writer in his free time.