Pinterest has been ‘running an experiment to remove the ‘Visit Button’ from Pins that lack a high-quality link.’
When you make a Pinterest pin, many do not have any visible clickable link - no visit button, and the title is no longer clickable. There is nothing showing the potential customer where to click, they just think it is a dead link.
Pinterest explains that the customer can click the 3 dots in the pin and it will give other options such as to visit the site. The problem is, most customers do NOT know to do this.
There, I posted that I had found a comment from Pinterest giving their explanation of why links/titles in pins were no longer clickable. The explanation was:
Thanks for sharing your perspective and working with me to figure this out. I checked the Pin that you shared based on the screenshot and we are running an experiment to remove the ‘Visit Button’ from Pins that lack a high-quality link. However, other users can still visit the link connected to your Pin by clicking the three dots and select Visit site.
This is and will continue to adversely affect sales. Imagine thousands of pins being made by designers to advertise Christmas sales/products and customers not able to click through on that link. Can someone from Zazzle talk to Pinterest directly and find out what is going on? This bone-headed move on their part of ‘hiding the visit button’ is negatively affecting designers’ and Zazzles’ earnings.
ETA: When I link to my own website, this does not happen. It only happens when I link to Zazzle directly. As per the Pinterest explanation above, why would they be considering a link to Zazzle as ‘not a high quality link’?
I’m freshly back from trying to use our Share link, finding I wasn’t allowed to use it because of strange excuses about pinning too much or too quickly. Given this was the first time I’ve gone to Pinterest in several months, I’m thinking I was lied to about the reason. I ended up creating my own pin to upload, which works as it should–including an actual link!–but who has the time to create every pin manually? There’s that, but there are also links being wiped out on older pins.
What on earth is the point of discouraging us from using Pinterest?
Hi Barbara, all my pins are manual pins and it is still happening to me. On new and old pins. I think it is Pinterest that is doing it, not Zazzle as far as removing the ‘visit site’ button and making the pin titles not clickable.
So, the Pinterest you-tubers that I’ve been following recently said that Pinterest may block your account for spamming if you pin more than 5-10 pins a day. So, our options are to use a pin scheduler or create manual pins. I have been successfully pining about 10 manual pins a day, but as you mentioned, it is more time consuming to do so. The upside of that is, since I’ve been adding manual pins instead of Zazzle-generated pins my Pinterest views, engagements, clicks, etc., have increased drastically. This would be a good task for a Virtual Assistant, if you have the luxury of being able to afford one (I certainly don’t).
@klstock thanks for sharing what you have been shared by Pinterest. It’s a shame for those who are using the the affilate link for the 35% referral fee for sure. Because those non clickable links have two visible options to click either to Zazzle’s Pinterest page or to find other products that are similar within Pinterest. I’ve given up using the 2.0 referral system and gone back to the old fashioned 15% referral links. At the very least I can get some money for my efforts.
@klstock You say your manual pins are also being hijacked?
Interesting but I go days without creating a pin, all my pins are manual pins, and the most I ever pin a day is usually 2 pins. And yet when I create a manual pin and link to Zazzle, it most often makes the title not clickable. I do think it is better to do manual pins vs the auto-generated ones for the same reasons you said.
@klstock@LMGildersleeve It seems to be completely random, which is doubly frustrating! Some of my manual pins do have it, some don’t. Some of my straight-outta-zazzle pins have it, some don’t. So apparently only SOME of Zazzle’s links are high quality?
I’ll bet you that anything you pay to promote is high quality enough… I just checked out my pins. Everything I pinned up until yesterday appears to have working links. Nothing I pinned yesterday does. FWIW, I only post about 4 pins in any one day.
Everything I have linked to my own website works fine. I only started my website less than a year ago though so all my pins prior to that link directly to Zazzle and many of those are no longer clickable. So it looks like, for those that are no longer working that are linked directly to Zazzle, I will need to replace the link in my pin so it goes to my website instead of Zazzle.
ETA: I am almost always using my desktop computer and not a phone for viewing. But on some of the pins that no longer have a clickable title/visit button - when I view them on my phone, rather than on my computer, there is a visit button viewable/clickable - but not when viewing on my computer.
I believe the reason the links from Zazzle are not considered high quality links are because of the sheer volume of links that come from Zazzle that are on Pinterest. In comparison, pins from our own websites will have fewer links overall (by millions I would guess) than pins linked directly to Zazzle. Having said that, it makes me curious if say, Amazon links, are considered high quality. If anyone knows any Amazon affiliates that use Pinterest to promote they could check the pins. If they are clickable that would make my guess moot. I hope that it can be fixed because regular Pinterest users won’t really think to check around for other ways to find a link. They will click, it won’t work, and they will think it’s a broken link and move on.
That is a good point! I am and have gotten self-referrals, but I am linking to my own website now for the most part. For all the old pins I did prior to a few months ago, those link to Zazzle directly and only about half have a clickable title/visit button.
And yes, all my pins are manual and about half of the ones linking to Zazzle directly get the thing where the pin title is no longer clickable and there is no visible ‘visit’ button. Also any manual pins linking directly to Zazzle are also subject to have the titles and descriptions revert to the generic Zazzle description.
Are you sending product links to your web site and then from your site to your product pages? In other words, kind of a stopover station? Or are you actively promoting from your site?
I scrolled through my Pinterest home feed and found Amazon, Walmart, TeePublic, RedBubble, Etsy, Ebay links that hand clickable titles. I will look around more later. I would never have thought to click on the 3 dots, I never even paid attention to it before!
I completely understand your frustration and feel the same way about the challenges we’re encountering with Pinterest. However, I don’t think this is Zazzle’s fault—it seems more like an issue with Pinterest’s algorithm, and perhaps even AI analyzing pins.
From my perspective, Pinterest appears to favor Zazzle as the authority, likely because Zazzle invests heavily in advertising on the platform. When we upload Zazzle product photos to Pinterest, it seems the platform prioritizes Zazzle itself over individual designers. For example, when using Pinterest’s image search feature, the “shop similar” results often show a direct link to Zazzle. If I click on that image and make a purchase, I suspect Zazzle gets the referral—despite the fact that I was the one who posted it on Pinterest.
I’ve tried directing product links to my own website before routing them to Zazzle, but I imagine this process feels cumbersome to customers. Initially, this approach worked well for me and boosted my Pinterest views. However, about a month ago, my views began to decline. My guess is that Pinterest’s algorithm now gives more weight to the original source of the photo, which is typically Zazzle.
With all these changes, I’m curious: does anyone have insights on whether it’s better to stick with the Promoter 2 program or switch to the regular promoter program? I’ve also noticed a shift in my sales patterns. In the past, many were listed as “none” or self-referrals, but now nearly all are coming through as third-party referrals. Are our promotional days with Pinterest over?
Yes, as I said in my post, I also believe Pinterest is the culprit and they said so in their own words that I posted above. But I am referring specifically to why some pin titles are made unclickable and/or the visit site button gone from many Pinterest pins that link to Zazzle. I am not referring to the issue of pins reverting to generic Zazzle descriptions which is another PITA!
I believe you may be correct about Pinterest using a (weighted) algorithm possibly run using AI, which appears to be the darling of so many of the larger platforms.
A lot of those third party referrals likely come from Zazzle itself because of their own promotional efforts, which quite often swipe our own self-referrals. One thing I’ve noticed is a distinct change in at least my own sales. I used to get a lot from the UK, but now my sales are almost exclusively in the U.S., which I think reflects the cost of shipping.
My plan is to fiddle with Pinterest but not break a sweat over it. They’ve been changing things so much that I fear any work I do now will be negated by the next thing they and Zazzle decide to do.
