Pages

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Pinterest Spam Alert

I've said it once, and I'll say it again... I love Pinterest. And if you are looking at this post, you probably arrived here via Pinterest.  So maybe you can help me....

I have an issue that I'm trying to sort out....

A few months ago, I put up my very first pin... it was for a repurposed cable reel table which I had made.   Click here for the instructions.

Within a couple of weeks, it had been repinned nearly 1000 times.  I was quite staggered.  (What a pity I wasn't selling them on my blog!!).

One day, I found myself playing around on the Pinterest site, and noticed that if I entered "cable reel" into the Pinterest search box, my little table came up on the screen hundreds of times!!! What the??

So I started clicking on the images, and noticed that some of them didn't link back to my blog (which is what is supposed to happen when you click on an image on Pinterest), they either went to another site selling something, or else there was an alert put up by Pinterest saying:



I sent a message to Pinterest to report this and I'm still waiting to hear an answer from them.

I think I might have to delete my original pin.... and replace the picture with another one.  But who's to say it won't happen again?  I certainly don't want to direct people to spam sites!



Just for the record, I'm going to load up a screen shot of my original pin - which has now got close to 10,000 repins.

I'm not a technical guru, so if someone out there can tell me what to do ... I'd love some advice.

5 comments:

  1. That is so frusterating. I love pinterest. I've posted a few of my projects as well, but never thought to check and see if they all route back to me. Good luck, hope you get things worked out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. People just save the photo to their computers and then upload the photo to pinterest. Ok if it's s photo they took and are pinning, not ok if they took it from your pin or website and don't have it linked. Then people get frustrated and report the picture as spam because there is no link. Hope that helps..

    ReplyDelete
  3. I found you after I saw your comment on one of the pins. The one I had sent me to spam but I love the table so much I had to search it out! Hopefully contacting Pinterest will help with the spam. It's unfortunate. :/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Spammers also find pins that have gone viral, copy them, and pin the original pin with their own link. Happens quite often, no chance that pinterest can keep up with it... Keep the original pin!

    ReplyDelete
  5. This table reminds me of a story of a couple of friends of mine. They went straight to the telecom company to get a reel (they're quite gutsy!) and the telecom guys looked at them like they had two heads when they said they wanted it for a table!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking the time to comment.