My experience with getting one of my websites blocked on Pinterest, appealing, and finding a workaround.
Hi there,
We’re letting you know that we’ve blocked your website (###) on Pinterest because of some activity that goes against our spam policies.
If you think we’ve made a mistake, please click this link to let us know.
Note that the link above will expire after seven days.
If you have further questions, you can contact us through our Help Center.
The Pinterest Team
We blocked your website on Pinterest
One day out of the blue I received the above email from Pinterest, informing me that my website has been blocked on the platform.
The website in question is a digital marketplace, and social media services are being sold there. There are also services for Pinterest Followers and Repins (shares), which is probably why Pinterest banned the site on their platform.
There was not much I could do at this point, other than click the link in the email and appeal this suspension…
Appealing the Suspension
Seeing as Pinterest gave me the opportunity to appeal the suspension, I clicked the link in the email above, because why not.
This was the only move I had, and if the outcome was negative, I wouldn’t try to contact them to try to get them to reconsider, because the website that they banned is in fact selling the types of services that go against Pinterest’s policies and rules. You are not allowed to sell Pinterest Followers and Repins anywhere. So trying to escalate the situation by emailing them and contacting them on social media was pointless.
A few days later I received this unfortunate reply from them:
Hi there,
We’ve considered your appeal and decided not to unblock your website (###).
Please review the Community Guidelines for more detailed information on what Pinterest considers spam.
If you have further questions, you can contact us through our Help Center.
So they decided to not unblock my website. This means that my website is permanently suspended on Pinterest, and I cannot make any new posts/pins which include my website URL as the destination. When I say permanently banned, I mean, who really knows, maybe a few years later the website gets unbanned (this happened to me on Facebook). But for all intents and purposes, that domain name is banned on Pinterest forever now.
To my surprise, they didn’t ban the Pinterest account that I had for the website in question. This was good news, because the account had a lot of posts and followers, and I would hate to lose them, especially the followers.
But now how would I share new posts from my website onto that account? Read below for my solution…
The Workaround
Unfortunately, there is no easy workaround to being allowed to share your website on Pinterest again.
The best way would be by getting a different domain name, and redirecting that domain to your website. So then you are sharing that new domain on Pinterest, and if anyone clicks to visit it, they get redirected back to your actual website. The problem with this is that it will cost a little bit of money and take some time and effort to set up. But in the end, Pinterest could ban that new domain at any moment, and then it was all for nothing, or you have to keep doing the same thing with a new domain every time it happens.
I have no interest in doing all of that, so I’m content with a two-step approach. What I do is I utilize the social media accounts that I have for my website, and I share the links from there onto Pinterest.
So for example, if I write a blog post on my website and share it on my Twitter or Linkedin page, then I take the URL from that post, create a new pin, and use that URL as the destination link on Pinterest. So now if anyone on Pinterest clicks to visit the link, they will be taken to that Twitter or Linkedin post. And then in that post they can click the link to go to my website. It takes a little more work, but better that than nothing. Besides, the people that really want to visit the destination link will still do that. It’s just one extra click.
Here is a video I made talking about this:
Summary
In the end, while this sucks, it’s not the end of the world. I continue sharing my website’s posts on Pinterest, using social media URLs as the destination links, and it works. And the best part about it is that Pinterest cannot ban Twitter or Linkedin, so this method cannot really be blocked by them, other than banning my Pinterest profile/account… which they also do actually, so I have to be a little careful not to share stuff that Pinterest may really dislike… such as services selling Pinterest Followers or Repins.
In fact, I won’t share this article on Pinterest, because I give a workaround to get around their policy, and they may not like that 😎