Recipe Bloggers Lost on Pinterest Algorithm
Recipe bloggers are struggling to understand and optimize for Pinterest's algorithm, which they perceive as a search engine rather than a social platform. They grapple with low click-through rates despite high impressions and seek community understanding of how to improve visibility and traffic. Many are experimenting with descriptions and consistency to achieve organic growth.
SOURCES (60)
“That makes sense.A gradual increasee usually looks much moree natural than a suddenn jump...”
“For months I was constantly trying to keep up - new trends, seasonal stuff, whatever was blowing up on Pinterest. Exhausting and the results were mediocre at best. So I stopped, went deep on one niche with evergreen designs and things got better. Not sure if it's the niche, the consistency, or just that the algorithm rewards older listings. Has anyone else found that chasing trends was actually hurting them? submitted by /u/ExpressionCrafty1460 [link] [comments]”
“I've seen a wave of small pinterest accounts (under 5k followers) leaning hard into pinterest marketing automation lately. Tools, queues, batch design workflows. Used to be the tooling crowd was almost exclusively bigger creators or businesses, now i'm seeing solo bloggers with 800 followers running stacks that look like agencies.Is this a good thing or are people just over engineering small accounts? I'm curious if anyone's small + automated and seeing it pay off vs small + manu”
“I can relate to this. Sometimes it feels like getting those first few interactions is the hardest part. Once a post has some engagement, more people seem willing to stop and look at it. Even so, I think consistent content is what makes the biggest difference over time.”
“I have tried Instagram and Facebook ads but the cost per click is getting too high. Someone told me Pinterest is better for product discovery because people go there to search for things to buy. I have a Pinterest account but I have not posted in months. I'm wondering if it is worth the time to start posting again. How many pins should I post per day for an ecommerce store. Also should I focus on product images or lifestyle photos. submitted by /u/OkImagination6697 [link] [”
“I manage a blog that currently gets ~1k clicks/month. Since Sept 2023, I’ve published 184 posts and across those posts there are ~684 internal links. The thing is, I feel like some pages have way too many (outbound) internal links and that the internal linking structure's got a bit messy over time. To give you a bit of perspective, one of my posts has 15 outbound links! I’d like to clean it up but I’m not sure what the most logical process should be. I've removed a couple of links pointi”
“Pinterest doesn't drive anything but traffic. It's for inspiration, not purchasing.”
“I have always thought small,gradual orders look much more believable than huge instant jumps.Good to hear that was your experience too…”
“Running Pinterest for my own Shopify store . Here's what's driving me crazy. The traffic and saves are clearly there. People find a pin, save it, click through. But then a big chunk of them don't buy right away — they come back a couple weeks later and by then they're landing through Google or just typing my store name in. So in my analytics Pinterest looks almost worthless, even though I can feel it's where a lot of these people first found me. I've caught myself almost”
“ok I need to vent / ask for help because I'm stuck on this. I run pinterest for a few ecom clients and every renewal it's the same fight. pinterest is slow. someone saves a pin, disappears, then buys like 2-3 weeks later. but by then they come back through google or just type the store name in directly. so last click gives pinterest basically zero. client opens their dashboard, sees pinterest made "$0" and starts wondering why they're paying me. meanwhile the saves and traf”
“Hi, these days I started to help with posting on Pinterest. I would like to know whether I can directly use the same pictures and text from Instagram? I am running a small brand of furniture. submitted by /u/Candid_Remove_6922 [link] [comments]”
“Hi everyone, I’m looking for some advice on how to turn Pinterest impressions into actual traffic. Right now, my Pinterest account gets over 62k monthly views. However, it barely generates any outbound clicks to my shop. Currently, about 99% of my sales come purely from organic traffic within Etsy itself. Does anyone have tips on how to convert high impressions into outbound clicks and sales? My pinterest account link: https://pin.it/7Gc0JUqah submitted by /u/TheBigSadShp [link] ”
“I don't usually share stuff like this but I keep seeing people panic about Pinterest suspensions lately so maybe this helps someone. Two months ago I wake up, open Pinterest, and my account is gone. Not suspended — deleted. No email warning, no violation notice, nothing. An account I'd been building for months with real content, real engagement, growing traffic every week. Just gone. First thing I did was go down the Google rabbit hole. Turns out Pinterest has been running way more aggre”
“About two months ago one of my recipe accounts tanked. I'm talking 90% drop overnight. Impressions went from steady growth to basically nothing. No warning, no email, nothing. I freaked out. Spent days searching for answers. Tried everything I read online — checked my domain verification, looked at my pinning schedule, tested new pin designs. Nothing helped. Then I started digging into the account itself and found something I didn't even know existed. I had over 20 pins that were silentl”
“After the last dip last month, my traffic was somehow coming back up, but from like 16 June, my traffic has dipped again by more than 70%. Anyone experiencing this same thing or it is just me and my account? The worst thing, my entire content is human-created (no AI at all). submitted by /u/mrmicroadk [link] [comments]”
“Every attribution number is a claim about a world that never happened. "This channel drove X" really means "we believe X wouldn't have happened without it." Most dashboards make that claim with enormous confidence and very little justification. This is a story about what that costs. A founder, runs a beauty brand on Shopify with her sister, a few years in, profitable, no outside money. Not a business in trouble, which is the part worth paying attention to. She told me she”
“Startet at the beginning of the year. Google still heavily ignores me. Am using pinterest, bluesky and fb page on autopost with Atelier Pin. Took around 2-3 month to see some traffic. Am at 7k now”
“The rumour is half-right, but it's not about automation itself, it's about lazy automation. Pinterest doesn't want its feed clogged with hundreds of identical-looking product mock-ups spat out by a bot. That's what gets you flagged. The platform wants fresh ideas and varied visuals. Instead of thinking 'one product = one pin', think 'one product = five to ten different pins'. For one t-shirt, you could create pins showing: - A close-up of the design. - A lifestyle”
“Hi, I am currently trying to promote my Etsy shop that sells kids educational printables on Pinterest, but I am unable to wrap my head around what should my pins and boards look like, so I wanted to check out how others are doing it, just to find out that nobody seems to be using Pinterest for Etsy? I know that Pinterest and Etsy have a special agreement, and Etsy already advertises some of my products on Pinterest, but I am not getting much traffic this way, so I wanted to start pinning to my P”
“Keyword Research vs. Knowing Your Audience Everyone says keyword research first but honestly? Just writing for your actual audience works better in practice. When you know exactly who you're talking to and what they want, the right keywords follow naturally. Don't chase volume. Write to a real person. Example: Instead of targeting "easy dinner recipes" because it has high volume, think about who you're writing for say, a busy mom with 30 minutes”
“I've seen a wave of small pinterest accounts (under 5k followers) leaning hard into pinterest marketing automation lately. Tools, queues, batch design workflows. Used to be the tooling crowd was almost exclusively bigger creators or businesses, now i'm seeing solo bloggers with 800 followers running stacks that look like agencies. Is this a good thing or are people just over engineering small accounts? I'm curious if anyone's small + automated and seeing it pay”
“I ran a sort of accidental experiment over the last 5 months. I help my mom with her etsy shop (vintage jewelry) and I also run my own (knitted goods). Same pinterest strategy, same posting schedule, same general design templates. Her shop's pinterest is doing 3x better than mine and we cannot figure out why Vintage jewelry pins consistently get 4-6% click through, my knitted goods pins are at like 1.5%. she's posting fewer pins than I am with worse photography”
“I see so many stories about people getting thousands or millions of monthly visits from Pinterest, yet after a year of consistent work, my traffic is barely at 300. I’m clearly missing something. To those successful on Pinterest: Is there a 'secret' strategy I’m missing? Does it only work with specific content types? How long did it take for your traffic to really grow? Any honest advice would be appreciated!"<”
“I've seen a wave of small pinterest accounts (under 5k followers) leaning hard into pinterest marketing automation lately. Tools, queues, batch design workflows. Used to be the tooling crowd was almost exclusively bigger creators or businesses, now i'm seeing solo bloggers with 800 followers running stacks that look like agencies. Is this a good thing or are people just over engineering small accounts? I'm curious if anyone's small + automated and seeing it pay”
“The bulk pin variant problem you're describing is genuinely not well-served by most schedulers built for bloggers. Tailwind handles multi-variant pin creation better than most for POD specifically because it was originally built for e-commerce, and it has a bulk upload path that can handle color variants by templating. Might be worth a trial before assuming the category doesn't have a solution.”
“POD on Pinterest is its own beast, the variant volume thing is real, bloggers pinning one image per post don't get it. A couple of things that saved my evenings: build your pins in Canva as templates, then just swap the mockup + color and export 5-8 variants per design in one sitting. Way faster than designing each one fresh. Then schedule them staggered, not dumped. Pinterest can flag you for spam if you fire 40 near-identical pins in an hour. I space mine out”
“I’ve been trying to take Pinterest more seriously lately, mainly for getting traffic back to blogs / websites. The annoying part is not really one single thing. It’s the whole repeated process. You write a post, then you need to make pins, write titles, descriptions, find keywords, schedule them, test different designs, check what worked, then do it again for the next post. After a while it feels like a full-time job by itself.”
“10 years ago, I had a blog and Pinterest was basically the only traffic source. Does it still bring in traffic for people today? I’m planning on starting a new blog and am curious about whether I should invest the same energy into Pinterest. I feel like it was THE traffic source for many bloggers a decade ago.”