Within the past few weeks, we released our Winners&Losers list for Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. One domain that stood out for their SEO-success in 2016 was Pinterest.com. We even linked to an interview with Casey Winters, former growth product lead at Pinterest, where he explained how important SEO is for Pinterest and its strategy. Nevertheless, one week after releasing the article, we observed a remarkable drop of Pinterest’s mobile Visibility in Google’s most competitive markets.
In spite of the fast recovery of Pinterest.com, we can clearly see that this domain lost 40% of its smartphone Visibility in the UK, 35% in the USA, 34% in Germany and 34% in Spain. Today, the Visibility is still -16.5%, on average, in all countries where we collect our weekly data.
To get an idea of the impact of this drop, we could use the data for the UK. In this country Pinterest.com lost 40% of its Visibility on mobile, which makes it a drop of 167 Visibility points. From initially 417 points, down to 214 points. The entire domain Mirror.co.uk only has 165 Visibility points, Linkedin.com has 160 and Independent.co.uk 144, in total.
Playing with Interstitials
This Visibility drop happened just a week after Google announced that the Interstitials Update was rolling out, and many of us know very well that Pinterest.com pleasantly uses/used interstitials like this:
(1) Here the user cannot access the content directly:
(2) Here Pinterst.com is showing their APP download above-the-fold. The original content has been inlined beneath the fold:
This last kind of interstitial is quite interesting. The user only gets to see this interstitial if they type the URL directly into the browser or if they click on a link to this URL. If the user clicks on the search result for the URL on Google, they get to see an interstitial that Google considers to be OK:
Conclusion
It’s already been a month since the roll out of Google’s Interstitials Update, but we preferred to wait and see how this new Interstitials Update works and if we could see the same pattern in others domains, which likely have been penalized, too. Many domains that use interstitials and lost mobile Visibility in the same time frame, like Whosampled.com, Instructbales.com or Bose.co.uk, show a similar pattern.
These domains have lost keywords on every page between the first and tenth page of Google’s search results, just as Pinterest.com did. It is important to consider that they are not ranking worse, the Keywords are simply gone:
It is quite likely that Interstitials are a good business model, especially for Pinterest.com. This could very well be the reason why they waited until after Google’s update hit them, before they cleaned up. At the same time, Google’s blog post announcing the Interstitials Update was also a kind of invitation to wait and see what will happen:
“The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.“
At the end of the day, it seems that interstitials did not work for Pinterest on smartphones. But they must actually work quite well, as Pinterest is keeping them around on Desktop 🙂
I hope you like it.
