The Ultimate Blog Podcast - What Bloggers Need to Know About Pinterest Today with Tony Hill

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

If there’s one thing bloggers can’t get enough of, it’s Pinterest talk – especially when it comes with expert insights. That’s why we’re so excited to welcome back Pinterest expert Tony Hill on The Ultimate Blog Podcast to talk about the state of Pinterest today. Tony is here to break down current trends, how things are evolving, and what bloggers can do this summer to get ahead. Whether you’ve been pinning for years or you’re wondering if it’s still worth the effort, this episode is packed with helpful tips, tools, and updates.📌Subscribe to Tony Hill’s free newsletter ☀️Get the Summer Startup Checklist🔗Start your blog today→ Join The Ultimate Blog Roadmap🔗Click here to check out the show notes for this episode!Do you love this podcast? Say thanks by leaving a positive review and/or rating! 

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinicki. And I'm Jennifer Draper. Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice.

Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If there is one thing we know that you love to learn about, it's Pinterest. And anytime we have Pinterest experts come on the podcast, those episode downloads go and you guys love it.

And so we are bringing Tony Hill back on. He's been with us before. We'll be sure to link that in the show notes, but we want to kind of talk about the state of Pinterest currently the summer 2025 and, and what that's going to look like. So Tony, welcome back to the ultimate blog podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. We're about ready to get into summertime here. We're currently getting into it and yeah, there's a lot going on. You know, the summertime,

usually, at least for me, you know, but you guys, it's a nice time to kind of take a step back a little bit, slow down. You know, the kids are home. We've got a pool and so we can go, you know, spend a lot of time there and go for walks and all that stuff. So we enjoy that time, slow down, but the internet doesn't sleep, Pinterest doesn't sleep, and so I still have to kind of keep one eye on that as well. So that's always a bit of a challenge. But yeah, I'm here today. I just wanted to see how I can continue to help other people with their Pinterest traffic and strategy. I've been getting a lot of interesting insights

into the platform this year that I can share and hopefully be of some value. Awesome. You always are. So we're so thankful that you're willing to come back and share what you're seeing currently. So where do you see kind of those trends happening like right now if somebody is looking at their Pinterest traffic or maybe they're not on Pinterest yet and they're wondering, you know,

what should I be doing on Pinterest? Where do you kind of see the trends with Pinterest currently? Currently right now, the way I look at Pinterest is how is Pinterest looking at Pinterest? How are they approaching their platform right now? What kind of adjustments are they making? What kind of features are they launching? Who are they hiring? I like to get some insights into the mind of Pinterest collectively to see what is getting their current focus. I can also learn a lot from their quarterly earnings calls. So I get into the weeds with Pinterest from that

kind of perspective because if I can get a better sense of what they are not only communicating to us as creators, but also to their shareholders, to their team, it gives you an idea of what it is that they value, what it is that they're currently focusing on, and what's coming up in the future. So right now, I think the biggest thing that Pinterest has seen and we're all seeing is a lot of AI on the platform. And, you know, there's been several articles that have come out recently about Pinterest and it's AI slop. I don't know if you guys seen any of those come out. Yeah. I think a lot of it had started, I think, with some

Reddit threads, people complaining about a lot of the AI on Pinterest. And, you know, there's some good AI, there's some bad AI and everything in between. I know I listened to a podcast with the CTO of Pinterest and he was not necessarily critical of AI on the platform. He was like, you know, there's a good use case for it when there's some good inspiration. I think the example he gave was like art, you know, or like even like art as in like pictures or even like tattoos, right? So some of these things are just inspiring and they don't need to be applicable to like the real world, you could say. But then there's the kind of content that has real world impact, right? So if you're cooking, baking, crafting, traveling, all real world things that matter,

and things get a little dicey when AI starts entering into that territory. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I've seen that Pinterest is trying to respond to that at this point. We're starting to see some changes that they're making. I've been honestly sitting here waiting for them to do some of these things because they've really been focusing on their ad side of the platform and really turning around honestly their profit.

I mean, they're finally profitable. And within the last couple of years, they've been able to get there. And it's because they made a lot of changes with, honestly, the number of ads that they're showing has increased. You see a lot of people complaining about that. You go look at the app store for iPhone, Android, and you look at the reviews for the Pinterest app,

you'll see a lot of people complaining about all the ads. But they've got to make money. It's a free tool, right? It's free platform. And so they really dial that up and they're getting better at showing targeted ads and whatnot. So there's that. They've been focusing a lot of their time on that, but now we're starting to see a shift

on focusing their time and resources on content and addressing this AI stuff. One of the things that they recently did, and I don't know if you guys caught this, but they did some mass banning of like regular user accounts. I saw it get a lot of traction and there's like a main Pinterest, Reddit, sub-Reddit, but then it finally caught the mainstream a main Pinterest Reddit subreddit. But then it finally caught the mainstream to a degree, like at least in the tech world. But what was happening is Pinterest, they came out with some sort of new algorithm to try to identify spam and also accounts that were violating copyright and whatnot. And they were just banning all of these regular users who were saving pens. And there was pens, sure, they were copyrighted,

but that's kind of the whole point of the platform. Like you just, you save anything on the internet that you, you know, is inspiring and it's an idea, whatever, and you just save it to a board. It's kind of like a bookmark, right? So all of a sudden people are saving these, you know, images from, you know, these, from social media or from blog posts.

And now Pinterest was saying, no, these are copyrighted and you've saved too many and we're going to shut down your account. And so there's all these users that were complaining about how they just, they've had their Pinterest account for like 10 plus years and instantly it was gone. All of their pins deleted. So after a while, this happened enough and it hit kind of mainstream, got Pinterest attention, and they ended up restoring a majority of these accounts, so it seems. And they admitted their mistake. There was an error on their part with this new system that was trying to detect all this

spam. I think they were going after the wrong people. But in some ways it can explain. So if you've recently had some traffic dropping from Pinterest, it could be because a lot of those accounts were banned and so that means all those pens were gone and all those pens with links to your sites instantly gone. So lots of people clicking, that kind of stuff.

That makes sense, especially if those users have had accounts like you've said for like 10 years. Because what we know is the longer a pin is on Pinterest, generally. It continues to perform like older pins are performing well. And I don't know if you have any like new updates with that, but I know personally, like my older pins still do bring, bring me traffic like that. That is still what's bringing. So when you shut down accounts that have pinned some of your older content

for bloggers, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It was rough. Yeah. So depending on your niche, right? So if you're in food, I mean, that's evergreen, right? I don't, I don't think some of the, some of these dishes, okay.

Sure. Sourdough may be really popular right now. If my wife's doing it, then, uh then I know it's kind of hitting mainstream. And so, you know, you may be seeing some nice traffic and uplift in your sourdough related traffic or content, but you know, that may die down the next couple of years. And so there's some elements to trends with some evergreen niches. So staying on top of those, of course, is great to ride those waves while they're there,

but then still having your tried and true chicken dinner recipes, is just gonna continue to send traffic. Now, if you're in fashion, maybe that window is a little shorter on the evergreen, where what was Fashion Bowl 10, 15 years ago, may not be the case now, but give it another five years or so. And it may like circle back around, right?

Like my daughter's starting to dress how a lot of the girls dress when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties. Yes, that is the truth. That is, yeah. It's like it all comes back around in time for sure. Yeah. Just being patient with that. So if somebody is utilizing Pinterest or maybe just noticing those shifts, what is a tip that you could give them to focus on this summer? You kind of talked about the summer looking a little bit different. I know Jennifer and I, our summers look different as well. Is there anything that they could do to kind of maybe clean up their Pinterest or to focus on Pinterest this summer as a way to kind of revitalize the account to

Prepare it essentially for like q3 q4 Yeah So what are the things that I'm seeing that uptick on is people deleting their pins? So they're going back through and they're deleting underperforming pins now I'm not saying go and do that If you want to just a you know huge warning of just be careful with what you delete because you just never know when a pen can take off. But if you know that if you're in a niche that is very trend oriented, for example,

and there might be a short life cycle like a year or two that a pen is good for, then sure, if it's a pen that's like five, 10 years old, those pens that never performed, they could be completely dead weight and can maybe hurt your account. But if you've got evergreen content like you're doing food and recipes and stuff, I don't know, I mean, honestly, like me, I am going through and I'm deleting

some underperforming pens that I think could be holding down in my account or even maybe some of my boards, but you just have to have a lot of discretion, right? So you can look at and judge, okay, here's a pen I created five years ago. How relevant is it today? Did it even get any saves beyond my own? Did it get any impressions or clicks? Is the image great? Like would I repin this like today, you know, in 2025? You know, if the answer is no, I the answer is no, if you've got the time, it might not hurt. Can we theorize what their algorithm is comprised of? But I would imagine account quality score, pin quality, that's going to be a factor in there.

And so if you've got a lot of old pens where you just in the beginning didn't know what you're doing, you got a lot of bad pens out there, you know, it's pretty obvious. Yeah, it might not hurt to just, you know, go ahead and delete those or maybe archive those, put them into an archive board or something. So that's something to consider. And I see some people doing and I'm personally testing, but can't guarantee results on that one. Another thing that I am starting to do is looking at, OK, I've had some pins that have dropped in traffic, and trying to figure out which pins those are,

and then is there anything I can do to make up for that? So maybe it could just simply need a fresh pin on the same topic, maybe give it a different angle with it. You guys talked about this tailwind report that they've come out with this year with Kate in a previous episode. And so fresh pens can do well, we know that. And some establishments like long-term can do great.

That's what I'm seeing a lot too. Fresh pens, even fresh accounts. So I've seen some people dabble in creating a second account, even though they've got one, maybe one website, got another account and they're creating additional pens for that. And that's working well too. If you're all in on Pinterest, I mean, if you've got the time to do something like that, I've seen some people have some success with it. So there's between that and then looking at also what

are pins that are doing really well, that have gone up like month over month or doing well in this. They did well last year. And so I want to see, OK, what can I target this season? So as we gear up for Q3, Q4, be able to look back at your top pins and see what performed really well, look at the boards that they're in to see, okay, how can I cover those similar topics? Look at those keywords that are associated with those pens and start planning out what

kind of content you can create that complements that as well. One of the things that I recently created was a tool that basically allows me to take all my Pinterest analytics data, I just dump it into this tool, and then it will show me, I can go back in time, like, all right, this time last year, what were my top pens? It looks just like the Pinterest analytics report, and so I can see exactly, I'm kind of frozen in time, what were those top pens? I can see all of the annotations. I don't remember if we talked about annotations in the last time we hung out, but- I don't think so. Okay. So annotations are really important to the platform. So if you

don't know anything about Pinterest annotations, do your research, just high level. They're basically keywords that Pinterest will assign to your pens. They analyze your pen, understand what it's about, and they assign these keywords to them. And then they also assign keywords to users on the platform. And those keywords are relevant to what are the interests of those users? What are the different topics and subtopics

that they're interested in? And they're trying to find a match. Like, OK, this pen is about sourdough, right? And this user is interested in sourdough. And so they're going to try to find those matches and show your pen to the right users. And so Pinterest will actually show you what these special keywords are that they

associate with your pen. It's a little hidden. Like, you've got to look at your pen logged out, and you've got to click on, there's like three vertical dots, as you'll see by your pen. And you click on that, and they can click on more information, and then it will show you these keywords. Or you can use, there are tools out there,

PenClicks is one of them, where you can just paste in your pen URL and it will instantly show you all those keywords. But those are really important ones to target because these are special keywords in Pinterest database that they have of all of them. There's like 12 plus million of them. And I want to know, okay, my top performing pens, what are the keywords associated with them?

These special keywords that Pinterest has decided that these pens are about, because I want to continue to target them. But also what I've discovered is that there are keywords that Pinterest has been assigning to my pens that I didn't even know about. Like I didn't even target them. They never came up during my research. But now like these pens are sending me

and these keywords are sending me traffic. So these are like the golden keywords. And so I've been able to then start creating new pins to target these, basically these keywords that I was missing out on. It's kind of like, you know, back in the day when a lot of us were getting traffic from Google and you can go to Google search console

and you can look at all the keywords that was sending, that was sending you traffic and you can see that list. You're like, oh, here's some keywords that, like you traffic. And you can see that list, you're like, oh, here's some keywords that I wasn't even targeting, but they're related to a post. But then you can just grab those keywords, plug them into your posts. And all of a sudden, your posts ranking would go up even higher, your traffic would go up because now you're targeting that keyword and you have it in your content. So kind of a similar idea. I want to kind of even take this, like, keep going with this idea because, you know, we've got people there, it's summertime, they're going to dig into their Pinterest, they're

going to use a tool, they're going to figure out these keywords, they're going to start being like, okay, I'm going to start pinning more, I'm going to get on board with this fresh pin idea. But then also, like we touched on AI, we touched on how Pinterest is trying to crack down on AI. But there's got to be a way that as bloggers, we can utilize AI to help us with our Pinterest strategy so that we can create more, but yet are there rules we need to follow so that we're not going gonna end up getting shut down or have our pens not be shown because of AI? How can you find a good balance so that we can get more done, but we're still thinking

about the user and we're still making Pinterest happy? Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, because one of the updates that Pinterest made at the end of April was they rolled out the AI modified label. So they are now labeling pins with AI modified. If they detect that it was modified or created with AI. Now, we saw them test this out maybe like October of 2024, but they were only able to show this AI modified label to pins where in the metadata, so like when you have an image, there's like kind of hidden data embedded in the image, like the resolution, maybe the camera that was used to take the picture, all that kind of

stuff. Pinterest was reading it and they were able to determine that some images were created using some sort of AI tool because that AI tool, when you would generate the image and you would download it, they would embed in there and it's that metadata that like the name of their tool or some sort of like there's an official property, I forgot what it's called, but it's like digital source media or something. And so Pinterest was able basically to determine, okay, this image was created with an AI tool. Now there's a way to skirt around that.

There are ways that you can just upload an image to a tool and it will wipe out all that metadata. And so then you upload it to Pinterest and then at that point couldn't show the label. But now they can show the label even if you wipe out all that metadata, they've been able to build basically like their own version of an AI tool that will analyze the image and make their best guess on if it was created with AI or not.

Now this is starting to hurt, I would say hurt. This is starting to affect some real creators who are creating content without AI and they're starting to see some of their pens be labeled as AI modified. And that's because if they're working in Canva or Photoshop and they see something in the background of an image that they don't want, so they need to use like this, like a magic eraser tool, right? And it removes that thing from the background. Well, now it's being labeled as AI modified

because it has that metadata, for example. I just uploaded a pin that I erased the background and so now I'm wondering, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. So there are free tools out there where you can upload your image and then it will remove all that metadata. And so I think if it's a real image and you did something like that, and as long as you

wipe out the metadata, then it should be fine. I don't think it's going to be labeled as AI modified. I'm finding that a lot of the, say like first version of these AI created images, Pinterest is pretty good at detecting. I mean, they're pretty obvious when people started creating these and uploading them to the platform, you could spot those AI images a mile away. Now it is getting harder and harder to spot these AI images. It will continue to get harder. It's so, I don't know how long term of a strategy that is for Pinterest to do something like this

because it will be hard to detect, I think. But that's just something to be aware of, that Pinterest is labeling some of these. Actually created a free tool for people to use. They can put in their Pinterest account and it will scan all their pins and it will tell you which ones Pinterest has labeled as AI modified. Because Pinterest has come out with a form for you to fill out if you believe one of your pins that has been labeled as AI modified and it's not created with AI or modified with AI, then you can basically

do a reconsideration request, fill out this form, give them the links to your pins that you believe that should not have been flagged like this, and then they will hopefully remove that AI modified. So flaggedpens.com is the tool you can use to run your account there. Yeah, awesome. We'll put that in the show notes too for anybody interested, because I think that that's like if you don't know how to find it, like that's a really easy way. So thanks for creating that, Tony. Yeah.

Otherwise, like, yeah, yeah. Way easier on all of us. Yeah. I don't know how you would, I mean, fine. Because they're still rolling this out. And so not every Pinterest account will see this label. And so you can look at all your pens and you know, you don't see this. Yeah, modified.

But for some users, they're seeing it. Yeah. So that's where I like I had to build a tool for myself and for some of my friends at least. And yeah. So that's, that's been helpful. So, you know, that's one way that Pinterest is trying to tackle this AI issue is at least showing users, okay, we think this pen was AI modified just for your awareness. And at some point soon, they said they're going to be rolling out a feature where basically you can tell Pinterest to stop showing these AI modified labeled pens within certain categories. Yeah, so if you love recipes and everything for Pinterest,

then you start seeing a lot of these AI modified labels on pens. Eventually, you see this option appear on your account, you can maybe one day go to Pinterest and not see any AI food images. That would be awesome. Yeah, for now. I mean, at some point again,

it's gonna be indistinguishable. I don't know, but then AI, it's becoming so smart and intelligent and they can see things that the humans can't see that maybe the AI can figure it out. If you've been dreaming about starting a blog or you're stuck trying to grow the one you already have started, we have created something just for you. It's called the ultimate blog roadmap. This is our step by step membership plus course program that is designed to help

you launch, grow and actually build a sustainable blog-based business that fits your life. Inside the roadmap, you're going to find everything you need from how to set up your site to creating content with confidence, to growing your email list, learning the basics of SEO, and also building a long-term strategy that does not lead to burnout. Plus you're going to get access to live coaching each and every month, a very supportive blogging community where you can network and collaborate with others who are on the journey,

and real feedback along the way because we believe firmly that you should not have to blog alone. If you're ready to stop treating your blog like a hobby and start building something real, we would love to walk the journey with you. You can learn more and join us today at ultimateblogroadmap.com. We would love to help you build the blogging business of your dreams. What are some other hiccups that you're seeing on the platform right now that I think just bloggers need to be aware of right now? Yeah. So another one that's been impacting a lot of bloggers is Pinterest has decided

to hide the visit site button on your pen. Which is- I've noticed that as a user. I'm like, it is so frustrating as a user when I just did it yesterday and I had to click like three different areas and I could not figure out how to figure out what I needed to know about going to the Savannah bananas game Like that is what I needed to know and then I need somebody to tell me

Like what do I need to go to the park six hours before the game or not? And so I found a I found a blog post but like finding that visit site button It was so challenging to find the visit site button. So as a user, that was very frustrating. Yeah, yeah. I've seen a lot of creators report people commenting on their pens, like, where's the link? How do I get this information? It's, I think it's a bad idea that Pinterest is doing this.

I don't think it's serving anyone. I mean, I found, yeah, the only way I was able to make it work is I first had to save the pen and then back out, go find that board that I saved it to and then go back to the pen and all of a sudden it appears. Oh, goodness. Oh my gosh, that's a bit of work. That's asking a lot of our users. Yeah, yeah.

So hopefully this is a temporary thing, although they did officially come out with some documentation and an announcement about this whole removal of the business IPod. So it's here to stay for now. It's not a glitch or anything. At first we thought it was a glitch. You know, running Pen Clicks, I kind of get an interesting view and insight of the platform

and see what's going on with pens and keywords and everything. And so this was one of the things that we started to notice early on. And so that I was able to actually build another tool. If you go at flagpens.com, you can put in your account into this tool, and it will show you all the pins where the Visit Site button has been removed. And so I would then, again, go to Pinterest, contact support,

send the links to all those pins and ask them if they can restore the visit site button. And I've seen a lot of bloggers have some success doing that. Okay. So that you go to flagged pins for that as well? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that is very helpful.

And Pinterest is saying that they're hiding these because of the link quality. Like what's on the other side of that pin? When you click that visit site button, there's some sort of quality issue that they're hiding these because of the link quality. Like what's on the other side of that pin? When you click that visit site button, there's some sort of quality issue that they're having with that particular page. And I think there's a lot of false positives on it. Like probably the one that you were trying to access with the Savannah bananas.

But like, did you end up going? So I did end up going. I ended up figuring it out. And what I will say, it's interesting that, is that, have you, did you end up going? So I did end up going, I ended up figuring it out. And what I will say, it's interesting that you said that because it made me think about going to the site yesterday. And when I went to it, I wanted just like an overarching idea of this is what you need to know when you go to the Savannah bananas game and that's what the pin said. But the post was like this very particular city in that

stadium and all that. And that is not what I was looking for. So that was interesting that you just said that because I actually actually backed out and didn't didn't use the information. It wasn't helpful to me because it the pin was like what everything you need to know about going to a Savannah Bananas game. And so of course I'm like, okay, do I actually need to leave at 12 o'clock? Because I thought I was going to leave at four or 430 or five. And my son's like, we got to leave at 12, mom.

And I'm like, what are you doing? But like everything starts at two. So like I needed to have some understanding because I'm taking like three nine year old boys to the Savannah bananas game So I need to like understand is that necessary or is that just like for people who like to show up to the park that early and What I ended up finding out was yeah, it is necessary So for anybody who is going to the Savannah bananas game this summer all the stuff happens in the afternoon

but I actually ended up finding that from All this stuff happens in the afternoon, but I actually ended up finding that from, like, if you go to their site and click on our venue, that's where I found it. It wasn't from where I looked at it on Pinterest. So it's interesting that you say that because I don't feel like the pen totally matched the user intent and that could be why it was so hard to find. So yeah, but as a user, like which experience would you prefer to have? You can at least click the visit site button and find out pretty quickly that it's not a good fit. You go back to Pinterest, find something else or it's gone. Like you don't

see the visit site button and you've got to click all around it and eventually. Well, what I did was I went, I left Pinterest. I was like, I'm not going to find what I need here. So then I went, I just went back to my email and it was like, I'm not going to find what I need here. So then I went, I just went back to my email and was like, there's got to be something that they've sent me that's going to tell me what to do. And so I backed out completely of the platform because I was so frustrated by the visit site button. It was very, it was very frustrating, you know, cause you're like clicking and I'm like, is this my phone? Is this me? Like, you know, and so I, I'm sure it is frustrating. So I love that you is this my phone? Is this me? Like, you know, and so I'm sure it is frustrating.

So I love that you have this flagged pins that they can go in because I think as bloggers, this is something that we do need to understand is the user experience that people are getting on the platforms that we are putting our content on. We talk a lot about the user experience on our websites and making sure that like we don't have large pop ups or your images aren't too large or they're not taking too long to load and all of that. But there is also like, we have to consider the user experience where these people are coming from. Also Pinterest being one of those other sites that's going to hopefully bring

people over to our website and, and what is the experience that they're having over there? And if it's a negative experience or, you know, unforeseen or whatever, having a tool like flagged pins, I think it's a valuable use of your time. If Pinterest is a driving force to your website, that could be a spend an afternoon, you know, block out. I don't know how long that would maybe take depending on how much content you have, but spend an afternoon and just gain some insight there.

Like if you have a pen that used to perform for you really well and all of a sudden it's not performing at all, it might be that your user has no idea how to even get there anymore because that button's gone. Yeah, that's a good point. So it's certainly a factor and seeing some good accounts see a drop in traffic. I've seen legitimate pens and on the other side of that pin, when you go to the page, it was relevant. It loads fast. Again, I think there's just a lot of false positives with and with this. And I think that's going to improve over time as Pinterest gets more data,

more feedback and everything, but we're just in that early stage, growing pains as they figure it out now. So Tony, I want to ask you a question because that kind of brought an idea. Since you do dive so deep into analytics, I feel like your insights are really valuable here. Is there a specific like percentage that you're like, okay, you have a Pinterest issue? Like if you look at your analytical data, let's say you're looking at quarter two, like quarter two of this year versus quarter two of last year. Is there a number that you're looking at quarter two, like quarter two of this year versus quarter two of last year. Is there a number that you're like, okay, you might want to figure out what could be going on? What would that percentage be?

Do you have, I know I'm totally putting you on the spider, but is there like a number that you're like, you know, if you're over this percentage, you might have something going on. Ooh, yeah. You know, if you build a tool for this, Tony, I'm going to work on it. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, this would be interesting because I built Pinner Analytics, which will allow you to do an export of all of your Pinterest. Data. I recommend doing that every month. Do an export because after six months, Pinterest starts removing your data from analytics.

I don't know if you catch that, but like you can't go back seven months and see your top pins. It's gone. So it's like a, literally a 20 second process of clicking the export button. And then you upload it to this Pinner Analytics tool and it will show you some of the, some of these things that I've kind of been talking about. So you're dropping like pins that have dropped, pins that have really increased. And we're going to come out with a date comparison tool, kind of like, you know, Google search console where you can compare like, you know, you're over a year, for example, and you can see what pens really dropped. And if you're just seeing an overall account level drop, I mean, for me, if it's 10% or higher at the account level, that would be a little concerned

about that. That's when I started digging in for sure. That's my number though. It kind of depends on how much traffic you're getting, right? And how hard of a drop that 10% feels. Yeah. So maybe if you're getting like hundreds of thousands of clicks a month, that 10% drop might not be significant.

But for smaller accounts, it could have been, last year you had two or three pins that were really driving 80% of your traffic. And so that's something to be aware of too. And I see that a lot. And people don't realize that because there's no comparison feature in Pinterest analytics.

It's really frustrating. You can't compare different dates to see. And you have to look at the individual pin level one pin at a time to like then look at its traffic chart to see what happened. It's one of the reasons why I built pinner analytics so I can be able to see this kind of information. And so I'm just not like constantly in the weeds looking at stats for like one pin at

a time. So when you're going through and you're analyzing, you're kind of seeing what's working and what's not. Overall, is kind of the strategy still the same? So when you're creating content and you're gonna maybe refresh some pins, try to get some traffic to some old posts, are we still going out there and trying to find keywords? Is that how people are searching?

Or has any of the way that the user is finding your content changed? And does that change any of our strategy of trying to drive the traffic to the website, then trying to get them to read the posts, and trying to get them to sign up for the email list? Is there any new advice you would share from that perspective? Yeah, for me, I like to really focus on keywords. At the end of the day, that is what's going to drive traffic. Whether people are searching Pinterest or they're on the home feed, both places, they require for Pinterest to know about

and understand keywords. And so I definitely don't think it's a waste of time to spend time finding the keywords that are working well for you or that worked well in the past and then finding new ones. I think Pinterest Trends is a great first place to go to, but everyone else is going there and they limit how many keywords they're going to show you.

I think it's like 50. That's it. Again, one of the reasons why I build Piclix is so that I can see all of them. I think since I was last on here, we rolled out a new feature. It's kind of like Pinterest Trends on steroids steroids where we don't limit the 50 keywords. I mean, it's endless. We'll show you. And then we've got like all the categories on the left-hand side where you can, where

you can check food and drink and it will instantly show you the like 200 or something thousand, probably over a million keywords that are related to food and drink with search volume and everything. And so there's ways that you can save those keywords and you can keep track of which ones have you targeted, which ones you haven't looking at other accounts. And your niche is always a good strategy to see what it depends that they're creating, what are the keywords that they are targeting or maybe ranking for. It's one of the reasons why I built like the account exploratory,

little main clicks, uh, cause you can just put in an account or even just targeting or maybe ranking for. It's one of the reasons why I built like the account explore tool and then clicks. Cause you can just put in an account or even just put in your niche, like, you know, sourdough or whatever. And you can find bloggers who do things about sourdough and you can see what keywords are ranking for and which ones you haven't targeted yet. So just finding your keyword gaps is one of the best things

I think you can do, but also understanding, okay, what are the biggest keywords that are really important that I should continue to cover? Once you create some pins to target like your top 10 biggest keywords and most important that are gonna send you the kind of traffic that you want, don't stop creating pins for them. I think we get too busy and it's more exciting

to find new keywords to target, then we kind of forget the ones that really have a lot of leverage and to create fresh pens to retarget those consistently. And then also finding the keywords that are like what I call your core keywords. So as a basic example, if you have a recipe blog, recipe blog, one of the keywords you should probably always include in your pen title, or at least your description is the word recipe. You would be surprised how many recipe bloggers have gone to their Pinterest account and look at their pens and they don't have the word recipe in it. So yeah, and that

you're not really helping the algorithm with your pens. I wonder if the thought processes is that we don't feel like it needs it. I'm like so curious now if my recipes have recipe in there. So it needs to be in the title and the description you think? I would, personally, because you're going to find if you do enough research on keywords, you're going to find those core keywords. You can just even ask ChatGPT. Hey, I have a blog about in traveling You know, what would be the most commonly used keywords?

that would be of found or associated with a travel blog and literally that it would be words like travel traveling destination So there's a very itinerary. Yeah, so there's gonna be keywords that I And so there's itinerary. Yeah. So there's going to be keywords that I include in almost every single pen. And there's usually like two or three. Yeah.

There was someone I was talking to, I think they were a vegan blogger. And I was like, not only do you have to have recipe in every pen description at least, but also have the word vegan in there. I was surprised they had so many pens that didn't have the word vegan. I think that's helpful. And that's another kind of quick thing that you could do is go through and maybe make note of those pins that you're going to add that to, whether it, you know, depending on your niche, but that could be something that you could test out for sure.

It might not be worth spending, you know, if you have a lot of pins, it might not be worth going back and changing all of them right away, but maybe like picking some and seeing if it maybe pins that you thought would perform better or posts that you want to perform better and seeing if that's a valuable use and something that you needed to do moving forward for sure. I think that would be an interesting thing to test. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. One of the things that you can do is go back to that top pins report in Pinterest Analytics, grab all those pin URLs, go to them. You can go to them logged out of Pinterest, and you can go click on the vertical dots and look at those keywords, copy those, put them into a spreadsheet.

And then once you're done, put them into, go to Google, type in keyword cloud, and then paste all those keywords in there, and it will show you all those keywords. But it will adjust the font size based on how often a keyword is used. Actually, I want to build this tool for myself. I'm just thinking of this idea off the top of a good approach here, and to find those keywords that

are appearing the most, those annotations that we talked about earlier, on all of your top pens. But those might identify some of these core keywords I'm talking about. That's a good idea. Yeah. I'm going to do that later today. It all happened to your life, folks. It all happened to your life.

So one of the other things that Pinterest has been doing, and that could be affecting your traffic, and I really hope this is a glitch. It really does seem to be a genuine glitch. And it was something that we caught with pen clicks, because with pen clicks, we track the rankings of pens for all these keywords, like millions and millions of keywords. And all of a sudden we started to get some people email us and say, Hey, I clicked, I saw that I was ranking for this keyword, and I clicked on the pen and pen clicks, and it took me to a completely different pen. It wasn't mine. What's going on?

Is there a bug with pen clicks? And so we had a couple of those reports, so we dug into it. And no, it wasn't a bug on our end. It was on Pinterest. So Pinterest changed some things behind the scenes, like underneath the hood of a pen. And are you familiar with canonical?

Like with Google SEO, there was like canonical URLs. Do you remember this whole thing? Where you would tell Google, okay, there could be a couple different posts you have that are very similar. And you would basically tell Google, okay, no, this URL is a canonical. This is the main one, the primary one to consider. And so Pinterest

has the same concept with pens where they can recognize it. Two pens are very similar, but they want to attribute one to be like the canonical, to be the main one. Well, Pinterest has gone back through from what I can tell. They went through every single pen and they started changing up the canonical for it, which meant the pens were being swapped for certain keyword rankings. So people were losing traffic and yeah, they were seeing their pen was no longer ranking. And so this was, it's been really hard to diagnose honestly, but one of the ways that I've been able to figure out, okay, how can I help Pinterest understand what's going on?

Because people started contacting Pinterest support about it, Pinterest support people are like, yeah, we don't know what you're talking about. Like canonical ID, like they're not engineers, they don't understand the code and what's going on underneath. But someone had emailed me and said, hey, I tried sharing one of my pens on Facebook. And you know when you write a post on Facebook

and you include a link to it, it will generate a little preview of the image and the title of the posts and everything. So they pasted it in one of their pens and they were like, the whole preview of that pen was a completely different pen. It wasn't even mine. And they

posted it and they actually hit the submit button, posted it to Facebook. And sure enough, when people would click on that link, it would take them to a completely different pen on another account. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was a little scary. Not even to the post. Like not even to their post at all. No, yeah. It was their pen URL. They pasted it to Facebook. When people click on it, it takes them to another account and their pin, a completely different pin. And then when that person then clicks on the visit site button, assuming it's there, it's gonna, they're gonna go to a whole other blog post.

Maybe that's what happened with the Savannah bananas. Yeah. Right, so okay, this was like a sure far way of being able to communicate with Pinterest. All right. Here is a pin. When I share this on Facebook, people get redirected to a completely different pin. And so I was able to confirm this with a lot of other pins that had this canonical issue. Here's what I'm talking about. And so I added this as another tool on FlaggedPens, another free tool where you can put in your account

and it's going to show you these pins where Pinterest has decided, hey, we're going to canonicalize them, basically point users to a completely different pen on another Pinterest account. And we give you the exact wording to use at copy paste when you are contacting support to explain to the support people what is going on with sharing the pin on Facebook and everything.

So as of right now, Pinterest is finally responding with and recognizing, OK, this is a bug, and we're working on it. But we'll see what ends up happening with it long term. But it's been a little scary. But I think all this is in response to AI and so many pens entering the platform. Pinterest is trying all sorts of things.

So I continue to expect stuff like this to come up for a while now until Pinterest gets a better handle on it. And it's just something to continue to stay on top of with your pens, because they're always getting to be those false positives. And so just stay on top of those and contact Pinterest about it will be, I think, just part of your routine once a month or so, once a quarter. That can go a long ways.

But yeah, we'll just check those. How quickly does support generally get that fixed? I mean, do you have to like kind of stay on top of it? Or do you have any insight to provide them on that? Because, you know, if you're if you have 20 pins or something that this is impacted or more or whatever, do you have to submit a new support ticket per pin? Or do you do give this kind of like guidance and the flagged pins? Do you tell them exactly how to do it there? Yeah, so I provide like a copy paste text for you to put into the support description box when you're filling out the form and it includes examples from your own account

of the pen that is your pen that's being redirected to someone else's pen. And so within, I've seen within a couple of days, they'll have those fixed. Yeah. It's not a good day to work at Pinterest, it sounds like. No, they're getting bombarded. Yeah, that's, yeah. But hopefully, you know, as with anything,

when they see these things, you know, coming and that we're noticing and we're, you know, requiring or requesting them to fix it, hopefully that we're, we're noticing and we're, you know, requiring or requesting them to fix it. Hopefully that means there's going to be a fix in the background. Yeah, that's what we saw. Once I released this tool and I explained to people like on my newsletter, what was going on within three or four days Pinterest support finally started recognizing what was going on and it's a bug. So it is making an impact. And so some people, they don't have to do anything. They can just wait for those who, about us who are willing to

like contact support about it, but it wouldn't hurt to look at your own account and see. And it, cause it could be that it's some of your, your best pens that got flagged. This has all been so helpful. So you've talked a lot about a lot of the tools that you've created Tony, which I just genuinely want to say thank you because I think it helps bloggers as a whole. So be sure to check out flagged pins.com and then also pin clicks. And we have had Tony on before to talk all about pin clicks. So we will be sure to put that specific episode in the show notes,

but knowing you, Tony, I know that you've probably launched some additional things with pin clicks since that episode. So is there anything else that you're offering with pin clicks now that maybe you weren't at the time that we released our last episode? Yeah. So when you go use flag pens, it's going to scan, you know, like your first five, 10,000 pens or so, and you have to then remember to do that every month or

every quarter, but I decided I, I don't want to have to remember to do that every month or every quarter. But I decided I don't want to have to remember to do all that. And so I built a feature within Pin Clicks just recently where you can go in there, you can add your Pinterest account, and then Pin Clicks will scan all of your pins every 30 days. And it will email you if any of them have been flagged for these reasons, like the AI modified,

the Visit Site button is missing, or this canonical Facebook sharing issue. And so that way you can stay on top of it and you'll have to remember to go and scan and manually scan your account every, every single month or so. That's awesome. So helpful. We all need to like simplify all the things on our to do list for sure. So adding that is awesome. We will put a link to pin clicks and in the show notes and how else can they learn from you Tony, cause you're just a wealth of knowledge always. And we just always appreciate what you're willing to provide for everybody.

Yeah. So check out PinnerTools.com. It's a newer site that I created that just features everything that I do. Pinterest related. I've got a bunch of tools so you can use some free, some paid, that's where you can sign up for my newsletter and all that kind of stuff, where I like to email out at least once a week. A lot of times my email will contain some of this news information of just,

okay, here are some new things I'm finding with the platform. Here's some things for you to check and ways you can adjust your strategy. And then, yeah, one of the free tools, and I should have mentioned this before, when you asked the question of like, okay, how can we leverage AI to speed up and save time? And one of the free tools that I have is this Chrome extension that will write your pin description for you. So, and your pin title.

So what you do is you upload your pin to the Pinterest scheduler. If you use the native Pinterest uploader tool or scheduler tool, you use the native Pinterest uploader tool or scheduler tool, then you upload your image and then it will use AI to scan the image and it will also when you put in your URL, it will scan your URL and basically it'll take what your image is about and what your post is about and it will write a Pinterest friendly pin title and description for you right there inside Pinterest.

So check that out. That's totally free. Yeah, that's free. Yeah, that's free. You have to use your own API key if you want to connect it to like to have chat GBT write it for you. I want so and you get like a certain number of free credits with your chat GBT account so you can put in your chat GPT API key in there and and use it that way But yeah at some point I might have another option of you know Don't worry about getting your API key from chat GPT and you can you can just use it. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you Thanks for being here Thanks for all you're doing to just keep us in the loop with Pinterest and to be able to honestly just look at it from

This perspective of yes Pinterest is gonna change. Yes, you might run into problems But we can always figure it out and we can always pivot and stay positive with it. So just Thanks so much Tony. You're very appreciated in this industry and community and thanks for sharing everything, you know, yeah, my pleasure Thanks for having me on and I'm sure I'll be back on at some point in the future as more things change with the platform and as we continue to make adjustments as creators. Yep, you're always welcome. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter.

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