Hey guys! It’s been a while since I last posted.
I’m back with good stuff, I promise!
Last month, Pinterest accidentally blocked my website as spam… The best part? I did not realize it for a whole week.
As you probably can guess, I have learned a ton from this experience, and have also gathered enough data to measure the negative impact of this Pinterest block on my website.
So in this post, I will be covering:
- How I discovered that Pinterest blocked my website (it was an accident on their part)
- What happened to my business… seeing that I did not realize this for one entire week *the horror*
- What I did to fix the situation to get my website unblocked when I actually found out
- How I got my site unblocked within 10 hours
- Has my traffic recovered after the block?
- What I have learned from this entire experience about Pinterest
How I discovered that Pinterest had blocked my website & marked my URL as spam (erroneously, of course)
I was checking my blog traffic on Google Analytics when I noticed a slight drop in traffic.
Naturally, I started digging into why that was so. That was when I realized that I had almost no website traffic coming from Pinterest… and it had already been a week!
Needless to say, I started panicking.
I am used to Pinterest changing their game and algorithm every few days, but to have traffic drop to near-zero? I’ve never had that happen to me.
As you can see, at that point, my site had been blocked for a week, and I had failed to realize that it had happened!
My first instinct was to assume that my Pinterest account was blocked. But I could log into my Pinterest account just fine. In fact, I have been logging into my Pinterest account periodically throughout the week!
That was when I realized, to my horror, that it was actually my entire website that had been blocked by Pinterest.
Why I did not realize that my Pinterest blocked my website
If you are wondering why I had failed to notice that Pinterest had blocked my site for an entire week, the answer is simple.
I simply do not spend much time on Pinterest clicking on my own pins, or clicking on any pins, for that matter.
I automate almost everything with Tailwind (*get 15 days of credit if you go through my affiliate link) and focus on other parts of my business.
Of course, I regret that now. There is no need to spend hours on Pinterest, and it works really well if your website isn’t blocked, I promise!
Pro tip: Make sure you check Google Analytics regularly. I always find interesting things that are happening to my website. Had I checked my traffic earlier, I would have fixed this Pinterest issue much quicker and my traffic would probably not have been affected as much.
Here’s what not to do: Not checking your traffic stats regularly. Do not do this because weeks may have passed before you discover something has gone awry on your website. I recommend Google Analytics because it really gives you a ton of details which other tools may not show.
How to unblock your website if Pinterest marks your website as spam
After a while, I realized that my drop in traffic was because Pinterest had blocked my website and marked it as spam. When you attempt to click on any pin leading to my blog, you end up with a pop up that says, “Sorry, we blocked this link because it may lead to spam”.
Goodness! Here is a screenshot. The blogger in me knew I would eventually blog about this, so I made sure to take a screenshot of it.
Here’s how it looked like:
After panicking for a full minute, I got to work to actually get my website unblocked.
Here is what you should do to get your website unblocked by Pinterest:
1. Send an email to Pinterest Creator’s Support
I sent an email to creators-support@pinterest.com – this will get your request looked at faster because the people manning this email are in it to support creators like yourself.
This was the email I sent them:
Pinterest Creator’s Support should get back to you in 1 – 3 days and your website should be unblocked in no time.
If you’re wondering how fast they replied to my email, I sent the email at 1am and someone replied to me at 9pm on the same day.
This means I got a reply in less than 24 hours since my email to them – phenomenal!
2. Submit a Pinterest support request
Just in case, we should also submit a Pinterest support request as well. Why not, right?
Better to cover all bases in case one replies faster than the other.
To do this, head over to Pinterest’s Contact Page.
Under “Appeals”, click on “Pinterest blocked my site”.
Then, click on “A pin from my website is blocked for spam.”
Well technically all the pins on my website were blocked for spam, but this is the closest option available.
You want to fill in all the details and explain that your website has been incorrectly blocked for spam, along with a screenshot of an example pin that has been blocked for spam.
This was what I sent in my support request to Pinterest:
Hi Pinterest,
A week ago, my website (add your own URL here) has been blocked for spam. My blog has been around since ___ and we’ve never engaged in any spam practices, I make all my own pins. Please help!
I also added the URL of an example pin that has been blocked along with an accompanying screenshot of what happens when I try to access my website via a link on Pinterest.
Pinterest will send you an automated reply saying that they will reply in a few hours.
I sent the support request at around 1am, and at 5.16pm on the same day, Pinterest replied to me to tell me that my website has been unblocked:
3. Pinterest Advertising Representative
In reality though, at 5PM, my website had already been unblocked before Pinterest’s support got back to me.
This was because out of panic, I contacted my Pinterest Ad rep to tell them about my problem.
My Pinterest Ad Rep very kindly helped me to get the Pinterest team to look at it and got my website unblocked within 10 hours. Imagine my relief when I woke up in the morning to find out that my site had been unblocked!
Thank God for my Pinterest ad rep! So in the end, my Pinterest ad rep got my site unblocked the fastest.
But as we have discovered, methods 1 and 2 work well too!
What happened after the Pinterest block
Needless to say, my Pinterest traffic tanked big time during and after the block.
It has yet to fully recover, to be honest. I am not sure if it ever will. Currently, my Pinterest traffic is still down about 20%, and it has been almost a month since I discovered that my site was blocked!
However, do note that my URL was blocked for one entire week, so you most likely will not see much changes to your traffic as compared to me.
A painful lesson, I guess!
Something else I learned!
I also learned that I am now becoming less and less reliant on Pinterest to get organic traffic. I knew this at the back of my mind before the Pinterest block, but the fact that my site got blocked for an entire week without me noticing anything further highlighted to me how little my business relies on Pinterest organic traffic now. Thankfully, I also focus heavily on getting SEO traffic!
This is how it should be as well – I do not want to rely solely on any one traffic source too much. Things can change anytime and safeguards should be in place to prevent over-reliance on any one platform.
This is what I tell all my students and clients as well: Always diversify your traffic sources.
This was unlike in the earlier days of this blog (think: 2016), when everyone was having a whale of a time on Pinterest getting lots of free traffic from it.
I barely noticed any changes to my email list growth or income.
I hope you have found this tutorial helpful!
Now, go and get your website unblocked!
There is no need to worry, if your website is not a spammy website, it will be unblocked in no time.
I hope that you have found this useful. Thank you!
Hi, Thanks for giving us a heads up. I haven’t experienced this but I noticed my page views are stagnant at 20k. What’s up with that. I notice when I get really active on Pinterest my page views go up immediately however I have a lot of impressions, clicks and shares (not as much as you though lol ?) .
Btw. I use tailwind. I’m on the 14.99 per month plan. so how do I find my affiliate link?
Again, this is something I will look out for so I’ll now what to do if my site gets blocked. Thanks ??
Click on the heart shape on your nav menu and click on “send gift”. I’m glad you found this helpful!
Page views being stagnant is quite normal with Pinterest in recent times. Unless you’re constantly churning out new + amazing content, it’s hard to achieve exponential growth on Pinterest organically now –
Hi Raelyn,
Thanks for the info ?? Yes I see Pinterest is changing in that regard which is unfortunate but I will continue to put out as amazing content as possible. I love Pinterest and it still works for me than any other platform.
Yes, that’s the right mindset to have! 🙂
Hey Raelyn,
This had happened to a few people within the last few months, and thank you very much for letting us know the whole process. I have learned a lot from this.
I used to promote my content via Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, but it was too much work, and then I decided to focus only on Pinterest. With this, I realized that working on a few social media platforms is better.
Thanks again for sharing this with us.
Glad it helped you! I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.
Hi Raelyn,
Thanks for this post. I have a home-related site and my business mainly relies on organic traffic. I’ve been wanting to get started with Pinterest but no clue where to begin. And I’ve also been hearing a lot of Pinterest horror stories like this one, so I’m kinda scared. Do you any specific blog post that explains about getting traffic from Pinterest for beginners?
Thank you!
I have a post here! >>> https://raelyntan.com/pinterest-strategies/
A useful article Raelyn, thanks.
My domain hasn’t been blocked by Pinterest before but I do have another strange issue. I started my Pinterest account back in September 2019 and it was growing steadily until the start of August, when impressions suddenly died. I’ve tried a number of things to fix the problem: raised a support ticket, deleted poorly performing pins, redesigned my templates and start pushing pins again. I’m still getting no impressions and can’t figure out why.
Pinterest is a strange beast!
Hmm, interesting. As a whole, organic reach via Pinterest is dropping… time to get on the promoted pins bandwagon!
Hi Raelyn,
Kudos to you. I found this page from Google when I was searching for a solution for my blocked Pinterest account. It really works. Thanks again.
You’re welcome, Emma! 🙂
Is multiple different pins pointing to same URL spam? My site has been blocked too and I have filled up the form as well as contacted the creator support 🙁 I am panicking at the moment. I create all my pins and everything is hand made.. Infact I don’t even use tailwind for that matter.. I am really feeling sick at the moment. Only thing that may have triggered this is may be i have few pins pointing to same URL… But those are legitimate pins all created by me.. 🙁
Why don’t you use another email and try emailing them again? Doesn’t sound like it’s over for you! 🙂
Nice article, unfortunately my site has been blocked too without any reason. I dropped an email to creator support, but I get autoreply that says “It looks like your message didn’t go through. This usually happens if we haven’t heard from you and your original ticket closed. Sorry about that!
To ask a new question, please fill out our support form: http://help.pinterest.com/contact
We’ll get back to you within 1-3 business days.”
Thanks,
Pinterest support team”
It looks like its all over for me… Is this something known to anyone on this thread?
Bless you for this post! I just realized my site had been blocked and panicked for a hot second. I followed your advice and got a response from Pinterest in just 15 minutes. They apologized for the error and unblocked my site. Crisis averted! Thanks a million. 🙂
Hey Jenny, so glad to hear this! 🙂
This happened to me, and I’m shocked, we have 150K followers, we have 1.9 million access, and we do everything ourselves, never spam. Let’s see what will happen…
Any updates?
Hi, it was a bit stressful but I was able to reopen the account. Thank you. 🙂
Unfortunately, the same thing happened to me, in an arbitrary way they blocked my site with the claim that we spam, but absolutely nothing that is in the pinterest policy we infringed.
The support only responds that it does not unlock because we span, and all of our images are purchased and content written by editors.
I really see today that it is not worth it to keep creating content for a platform that at one time or another blocks you for nothing.
much better works with SEO or paid media than pinterest that tends to the maximum not to let traffic pass to your site.
My profile has 2m of impression per ems, it only generates 10% of traffic, it gets ridiculous.
I would still recommend to be on Pinterest, but not put all your eggs in a basket 🙂 Thanks for stopping by, Carla!
Carla, do you have any updates? My website was marked as spam, and like you, I can’t see what guideline I’ve violated.
My website was marked as spam too. Thank you so much, Raelyn.
My Pinterest account was blocked for spam. I do not know what is the reason but they did not restore it. I have to make another account. But the followers have been lost and my efforts are went to nothing. I have to work on a new account from the scratch. But the thing I am worrying about is Pinterest blocked my website url . I will follow the steps mentioned in the post and hope they will unblock my website url. Your all the articles are informative. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you 🙂
Thank you Raelyn.
I stumbled across this article looking for Pinterest marketing ideas. I haven’t been blocked by Pinterest yet but I have bookmarked this article to my research folder in case I ever do get blocked.
I love your website and glad I ran into it.
Sincerely – Bill
Thanks Bill!
Hi Raelyn,
Your trick has worked! I got my website banned by Pinterest a few days ago and tried many things to get unblocked, but nothing worked. after trying your shown way yesterday finally Pinterest unblocked my website. Thanks a lot for the help.
Awesome! Great to hear 🙂