Zazzle please take note - Regarding Pinterest's removal of the "Visit Site" button

[LMGildersleeve]

Many of us have been effected at one time or another with the removal of the "Visit Site" button from our Shared pins from Zazzle. We've been told we were a part of a test and all we needed to do was write to Pinterest to be removed from being part of their test.

But that isn't the entire answer. Pinterest has published this page entitled Links Not Displaying On Pins which helps clarify why this is happening to us. This article is for anyone who has a website and is sharing pins. That includes our pins shared from the Zazzle site. Below is the link to the article.

Links Not Displaying On Pins

[LakeEffects]

That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought the Visit Site link could return. Pinterest often baffles me. One day, I had over 4000 pins. I had been going through deleting non-viable pins (even though people say that's a waste of time). A couple days later, I only had 1900 pins. They were just gone.

[LMGildersleeve]

Yikes Deb that is scary. 😲

[Marcia]

Thanks, @LMGildersleeve for that article link! One of the things the article said was to verify Pinterest-bot. I clicked on that & read what Pinterest had to say about it. Does anyone know if this is something we want to do – to verify Pinterest-bot?

[ElkeClarke]

The article would indicate that some of the reasons are fixable because the title of the product and image of the pin do not match the keyword search. This makes total sense and puts the onus on Zazzle designers to fix their titles to match what the image represents and that the link is a direct link to an acceptable landing page.

Some of the times, when checking if a pin has the three dots or "visit site" your pin could be listed in a feed that does not apply based on the search results - which means you will see the three dots. 

The other aspects to why the three dots may appear have to do with how Zazzle codes on their backend - so if this is correct, it would be great to receive a confirmation that Zazzle and Pinterest are talking to each other properly in oder not to have the three dots result on a pin because the site isn't a verified site or appropriate landing page. 

I may be off base but this is what I am understanding from the article.

[Marcia]

@ElkeClarke thanks so much for your detailed explanation!

[Connie]

I wonder if maybe Pinterest doesn't think it's a valid landing page because Zazzle puts the "other designs you might like" above the product listing? In that case it would be Zazzle's fault, not the designer's fault. I haven't personally seen the issue on my own or other people's pins, but it does seem like people started complaining about it at the same time that they were complaining about the distractions and redirections on the product landing page.

[klstock]

Yes, that is what seems to be the case. This was discussed in this thread from December Pinterest Issue Must Be Fixed - Negatively Affecting Sales and tiffjamaica made the connection there between the landing page and the Pinterest issue. Zazzle never commented.

In retrospect, yes it appeared to have started around the time of the Landing Page. I used to make all manual pins and link those to my collection or product on Zazzle. But then the Landing Page stuff happened and it made me mad that I was doing all the manual pin work to give 60 other people free advertising with no benefit to me. So I started my own website and began linking there instead, which bypassed the Landing Page issue. But then I noticed on my old pins that were still linking to Zazzle, that the Visit button and clickable title had been made inactive, and then began looking into why. 

[Amanda23]

Does anyone who pins regularly remember around when this problem began? I’m wondering if the misalignment that Pinterest sees has anything to do with the changes in the landing page when someone clicks on our link. (ie. Was this happening prior to the change where other products were added above our own on the page?) 

I have also noticed that on the pins where Pinterest pulls the “description” from Zazzle, it’s info that’s completely irrelevant and not helpful. 

[Connie]

Pinterest has been doing that description thing for years. But I think you might be on to something; it does seem like the problems started about the same time that Zazzle began putting other products above the main product on the landing page.

[Marcia]

I agree. That's around when I 1st noticed the "..." vs. "visit site" thing.

[karab]

I'm in a private group for creators that's run by Pinterest, and the article was published because we brought up the missing "visit site" button up to the group moderator. She looked into it and they published the article to clarify what was going on. It's potentially not a permanent thing, but Pinterest is trying to combat low-quality content being linked to by spammers, and this is one way they're doing it, from what I understand. 

There's nothing that you need to do to verify Pinterestbot, as long as the robot,txt isn't blocking Pinterest that's not an issue.

If you do notice that your visit site button is missing from your pins, and it's a link that's a live link and isn't giving any kind of error, it's probably a mistake that will correct itself. But you can ask Pinterest to "remove my account from the experience" to get them to put the button back. I don't know if they're still testing this out or if it's going to stay this way, but asking them to remove you will take you out of the test if your account has been included in it. 

This has nothing to do with Zazzle, it's a Pinterest thing. Pinterest has a team that's working on this UI and is aware of concerns about it, so they're still messing with it. Another thing to watch out for is that if you have a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load it might have the button removed until the next time Pinterestbot crawls it and has a faster load time.

Also, when they test things out they put accounts in and out of the test for a while to see what happens. The disappearing site button might not have anything to do with anything, it could have just been Pinterest trying it out to see if it affected saves. 

[Marcia]

@karab this is really helpful – thank you!

[klstock]

We already discussed the part where you say "It has nothing to do with Zazzle" back in December in this thread Pinterest Issue Must Be Fixed - Negatively Affecting Sales where I commented to you there. This is part of that comment:

If the cause of why Pinterest is viewing Zazzle links as "not high quality" is something Zazzle is doing - such as redirecting to what could be considered a spammy looking landing page with several other products shown other than the one pictured in the pin, for example, then Zazzle does have control over that. I am not saying that is the cause, but it does make sense in context with the reasons given for why Pinterest would deem a link as "not high quality". I am not knocking Zazzle, just trying to get to the cause so the issue can be fixed.

It doesn't do anyone much good to keep insisting it has nothing to do with Zazzle, if it in fact might have a lot to do with Zazzle. We don't know because Zazzle never responded. 

[karab]

Okay. I think that you're conflating two things that are happening on Pinterest that don't really have anything to do with each other, but I'm not interested in going into this in detail here since it's apparently not helping.

[klstock]

No conflating at all. This thread and the other one I started in December were about why the Visit button was removed and titles not clickable in Pinterest pins.  

[klstock]

I posted this thread back in December Pinterest Issue Must Be Fixed - Negatively Affecting Sales  

Much of this was already discussed in that thread (by some of the same people in this thread) and Zazzle never responded.

In that thread, it was tiffjamaica who made the connection between the landing page and why Pinterest might view links to Zazzle as "low quality" (hence the disappearing visit button).