The entire "Pinterest backlinks" industry rests on a claim almost nobody has checked: that pin links carry rel="nofollow". We tried to verify it from Pinterest itself and couldn't — the served HTML contains zero occurrences of the word, and Pinterest documents it nowhere.
That sounds like it should undermine this article. It does the opposite. Once you read what Google actually publishes, the practical answer turns out to be identical either way — and that makes it one of the few conclusions in SEO you can act on without trusting anybody, including us.
Below: what we could and couldn't verify, what Google's documentation genuinely says, why the answer is robust regardless, the uncomfortable question that raises about our own product, and what Pinterest links are actually worth.
Pinning your own URL is not a ranking tactic. The argument holds both ways:
If pin links are nofollow (as reported): Google says such links "will generally not be followed." No ranking credit. Pinning 500 times achieves nothing.
If they weren't: Google's spam policies name "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" and "Using automated programs or services to create links to your site" as link spam. Pinterest is a bookmarking site.
Pointless or risky. There's no third door. So pin for traffic — that works, and it's what earns the real backlinks from other people's sites.
What a Pinterest backlink actually is
A pin can carry a destination URL — the page someone lands on when they click through. Point it at your own site and you have what people call a "Pinterest backlink."
Two very different things share that name, and conflating them is where the trouble starts.
| Your pin → your site | Someone's blog → your site | |
|---|---|---|
| Who creates it | You, in seconds | Someone who chose to |
| How many can exist | As many as you like | As many as you earn |
| Editorial vote? | No — it's self-published | Yes |
| Ranking value | Effectively none | Real |
| What it's good for | Traffic — genuinely | Rankings and traffic |
Both are useful. Only one is a backlink in the sense SEO means, and it's the one you can't manufacture.
Look at row three, because it explains everything else. A search engine values links as votes from other people. A link you created about yourself isn't a vote; it's a statement. Anything you can produce infinitely at zero cost cannot function as a ranking signal — that's not a Pinterest quirk, it's the whole logic of link-based ranking.
The claim we couldn't verify
Every article on this subject asserts that Pinterest links are nofollow. We wanted to see it ourselves rather than repeat it, so we went and looked.
| What we tried | What we found |
|---|---|
Fetched public pin pages and searched the HTML for nofollow | Zero occurrences. The outbound link is rendered client-side — the rel attribute isn't in the page you can inspect. |
| Searched Pinterest's help centre and business docs | Pinterest doesn't document the answer anywhere we could find. |
| Checked SEO authorities | Semrush and others state plainly that pin links are nofollow and pass no authority. |
Our honest position: almost certainly nofollow, per consistent secondary sources — not verified by us from a primary one.
This entire topic is people repeating each other. An article that confidently states "Pinterest links are nofollow — here's my proof: everyone says so" is exactly the machinery that produced the myths in the rest of this piece.
We hold this line everywhere on this blog: a claim without a source you can check is a claim, not evidence. We apply it to competitors' statistics, to Pinterest's own advertising numbers, and here, to a fact that happens to support our argument.
Which raises the obvious question: if we can't confirm the foundational fact, why should you trust anything that follows?
Because you don't have to. The advice doesn't depend on it.
Why it doesn't matter: the argument holds both ways
Here's the structure that makes this the rare SEO question you can settle without trusting anyone.
Door 1 — pin links are nofollow (the reported answer). Google's documentation says links with those attributes "will generally not be followed." No ranking credit passes. Pinning your URL 500 times does nothing for your rankings. The tactic is pointless.
Door 2 — pin links aren't nofollow. Then Google's spam policies describe the tactic with uncomfortable precision. They name "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" and "Using automated programs or services to create links to your site." Pinterest is, definitionally, a bookmarking site. The tactic is risky.
There is no third door in which mass-pinning your own URLs is both effective and safe.
That's why the unverified fact turns out not to matter. Both branches end in the same instruction: don't pin for links. Pin for traffic.
And there's a neat irony underneath it. The nofollow attribute that supposedly "ruins" Pinterest as a link source is the exact same attribute that makes pinning at volume safe — because of a carve-out in Google's own policy that we'll get to shortly, and which matters a great deal to anyone selling a bulk pinning tool. Including us.
What Google actually says
Three things from Google's own current documentation, quoted rather than paraphrased.
1. The attributes and what they mean
From Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links (last updated December 2025):
| Attribute | Google's definition |
|---|---|
rel="sponsored" | "Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value." |
rel="ugc" | "Mark user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts, with the ugc value." |
rel="nofollow" | "Use the nofollow value when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site." |
2. "Generally" is doing real work
The sentence most SEO content misquotes: "Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed."
Not "never." Since 2019 Google has treated these attributes as hints rather than absolute directives — it reserves the right to consider them. The same doc notes that "the linked pages may be found through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites, and thus they may still be crawled."
People read "hint" and conclude nofollow links secretly count, so the tactic works after all. That's backwards.
Google shifted to hints partly so it could keep looking at links — including, in its own framing, to understand unnatural linking patterns. A model that examines everything is not a model you exploit by building 500 identical links. If anything, "hint" means the pattern is more visible, not less.
3. What Google calls link spam
From Google's spam policies: "Link spam is the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings."
Among the practices it lists:
- "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links"
- "Using automated programs or services to create links to your site"
- "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes"
- "Excessive link exchanges"
Read the first two together while thinking about a Pinterest backlink service. A pin is a bookmark — that's literally what the product is. And "Pinterest backlink packages" are, by definition, automated services creating links to your site.
Then read the carve-out, which is the most important sentence in this article: "It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute."
The uncomfortable question about our own product
We sell a tool that generates Pinterest pins in bulk, pointing at your URLs. Google's spam policy names "using automated programs or services to create links to your site." It would be conspicuous to write this whole article and not address that.
So, plainly: read literally and out of context, that sentence describes what our product does. We're not going to pretend it doesn't.
Two things resolve it, and both are Google's words rather than our spin.
| Google's wording | Why it resolves |
|---|---|
"It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute" | If pin links are nofollow — as reported — the carve-out applies directly. The attribute that makes them worthless as votes is the attribute that makes creating them fine. |
| "...primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings" | Purpose is part of the definition. Pins made to reach people who click them aren't links made to manipulate rankings — they're distribution. |
If you buy a bulk pin tool — ours or anyone's — in order to build backlinks, you've chosen a tactic that doesn't work and adopted the exact purpose Google's definition describes. You'd be paying us for nothing, on the wrong theory, at a small but real risk.
Don't do that. Use it because you need to reach people at a volume you can't reach by hand. That's a distribution problem, and it's the only reason our product exists.
We'd rather say that clearly than sell subscriptions to people chasing a ranking effect that isn't there. It's also, bluntly, the safer business: customers who buy for the wrong reason leave in six weeks and tell people it didn't work.
What Pinterest links are actually worth
Ranked honestly, from what pays to what doesn't.
| # | What you actually get | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Referral traffic — real people on your site | The entire point |
| 2 | Discovery that earns real links from other sites | High — and it's a genuine backlink |
| 3 | Pinterest pages ranking in Google for your topic | Real, but you don't own the page |
| 4 | Attribution + analytics after claiming your site | Useful, free, five minutes |
| 5 | Ranking credit from the pin link itself | Effectively nothing — and if it weren't, it'd be spam |
The thing everyone optimises for is last. The thing that actually pays is first. That inversion is why this article exists.
Row 2 is the one worth understanding
This is how Pinterest genuinely contributes to your SEO, and it's indirect by nature: a blogger is looking for ideas, finds your infographic on Pinterest, and cites it from their own site. That's a real backlink — an editorial vote from a third party, the kind Google's whole model was built to count.
You cannot manufacture it by pinning harder. You cause it by making something worth citing and putting it where the citing kind of person looks. The pin was the introduction, not the link.
Which quietly reframes the work. If real backlinks are the goal, the highest-leverage Pinterest activity isn't volume — it's making one genuinely good thing (original data, a real guide, a useful diagram) and giving it enough distribution to be found. Volume helps that; it just isn't the mechanism.
A worked example: how a Pinterest link actually becomes a backlink
The indirect route sounds vague until you trace it, so here it is step by step. Suppose you run a small interiors blog and you publish a piece with a diagram: "Ceiling heights and how they change paint colour."
| Step | What happens | Link created? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | You pin the diagram, linked to your post | A pin link. No ranking value. |
| 2 | An interior designer searching "paint colour ceiling height" finds it | Still nothing. But a human saw it. |
| 3 | She clicks through and reads the post | Referral traffic — a real outcome |
| 4 | Months later she writes her own guide and cites your diagram | A real backlink. Editorial. From her domain. |
Four steps. Only the last one is a backlink in the sense SEO means — and you couldn't have created it directly at any price.
Now notice what you actually controlled. Step 1 and the quality of the diagram. That's it. Steps 2, 3 and 4 were other people making choices. You didn't build the link; you built the conditions for someone else to build it.
This is why "how many pins do I need for a backlink?" is an unanswerable question. There's no conversion rate, because the mechanism isn't a funnel — it's exposure multiplied by whether the thing was worth citing. Pinning a mediocre post 500 times produces 500 nofollow links and zero citations. Pinning one genuinely useful diagram produces some traffic and, occasionally, a link from someone who has a website and a reason.
Which is also why the honest advice is annoying: make something worth citing. There's no shortcut, and every product sold as a shortcut is selling you step 1 at volume while implying step 4.
Measure the thing that's real
If you take one operational change from this article, make it this: stop counting backlinks and start counting outbound clicks.
Outbound clicks are a real number, free, in Pinterest's own analytics. They tell you which pins sent people to your site — which is the only thing pin links do. Backlinks "acquired from Pinterest" is a metric you cannot verify, that no tool reports accurately, and that would be worthless even if you could count it.
The diagnostic that follows is worth more than any link audit. Impressions rising while outbound clicks stay flat means your images are working and your promise isn't — people see the pin and don't want what's behind it. Clicks rising and nothing happening on your site means the pin over-promised, or the page doesn't deliver what it implied. Neither of those questions has anything to do with links, and both determine whether Pinterest is worth your time.
On claiming your site
Do it, but not for Google. Pinterest's documentation says claiming "gives you insight into how often your content is shared on Pinterest," links your profile to pins from your site, and puts your picture beside them. The best part is retroactive: pins other people already saved get connected to you, analytics included.
The catch: "To claim a website, you must own the domain, subdomain or subpath, and you need to be able to edit the source code." Marketplace sellers are locked out — see creating pins for an Etsy store.
Five myths
Myth 1: "Pinterest gives you high-authority backlinks"
This one sounds plausible, which is why it survives. Pinterest is a large, trusted domain — so surely a link from it is worth a lot?
Two problems. First, reported nofollow aside, Google says links with those attributes "will generally not be followed" — a link that isn't followed doesn't pass anything, regardless of whose domain it sits on. Second, and more fundamentally: a domain's strength isn't a pool that its pages hand out to whoever posts on them. If it were, every free profile page on every big site would be a goldmine, and the entire link economy would have collapsed twenty years ago. It didn't, because self-created links on someone else's strong domain have never counted as editorial votes.
"Domain authority" is also a third-party metric, not a Google one. Optimising for a number invented by an SEO tool vendor, using links that vendor's own documentation says pass nothing, is a strange way to spend a Tuesday.
Myth 2: "Pin more to build more link juice"
If this worked it would be "using automated programs or services to create links to your site" — Google's own definition of link spam. The tactic is self-defeating: the version that works is the version that's prohibited.
Myth 3: "Nofollow is a hint now, so it counts"
A hint is not a loophole. Google looks at links partly to understand unnatural patterns — 500 identical self-created links is the pattern, not the exploit.
Myth 4: "Claiming your site passes authority"
It gives you attribution and analytics. Both are worth having; neither is a ranking signal. Claim it anyway — just for the right reason.
Myth 5: "Group boards build backlinks"
Same links, same attribute, more places. Group boards can help distribution, which is a real benefit — it's just not a link benefit.
Every myth treats Pinterest as a link source. It's a discovery source. That's a better business than the myth promises — it just can't be automated into a ranking, which is why nobody sells it.
How to build quality Pinterest links
"Quality" here means links that do the job links on Pinterest can actually do: bring people to your site.
Mistakes that waste months
Buying a Pinterest backlink package
You're purchasing nofollow links at scale. Worthless if they're nofollow; spam if they aren't. Fix: spend the money on making one thing worth citing.
Pinning the same pin repeatedly to "build links"
Repetition with no ranking upside, against guidance that names repetitive content published to monetise. Fix: different pins for different searches, or don't publish it.
Measuring backlinks instead of clicks
You'll optimise for a number that isn't real and ignore the one that is. Fix: outbound clicks, in Pinterest's free analytics.
Sending every pin to your homepage
The pin promised something specific; the homepage delivers a search problem. Fix: deep-link to the exact page every time.
Claiming your site and expecting rankings
It's an attribution feature, not an SEO one. Fix: claim it for the analytics, which are genuinely useful, and expect nothing from Google.
Assuming "hint" means it secretly works
A hint model looks at more, not less — including unnatural patterns. Fix: stop trying to outwit a system that has explicitly told you what it does.
Letting pins point at dead pages
Your pin will outlive that product listing by years. Fix: audit destinations at least annually.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Pinterest backlink?
It's the destination link on a pin — the URL a pin sends someone to when they click through. Every pin can carry one, and pointing it at your own site is what people mean by "building Pinterest backlinks."
There are really two different things wearing that name:
- The link on your own pin, which you control completely. This is what the "Pinterest backlinks" industry is selling.
- A link on someone else's pin pointing at your site — because they saved your content. You don't control it, and it's worth more.
The first is trivial to create at any volume you like. That's precisely why it's worth so little as a ranking signal, and why the tactics built around it don't work the way they're sold.
Are Pinterest links nofollow?
Almost certainly, but we could not verify it ourselves — and we think you should know that rather than take a fourth-hand claim on faith.
What we tried: we fetched public pin pages and searched the served HTML for nofollow. Zero occurrences. The outbound link is rendered client-side, so the rel attribute simply isn't in the page you can inspect from outside. Pinterest's own help centre doesn't document the answer either.
What we found instead: SEO authorities including Semrush state plainly that Pinterest designates pin links as nofollow, meaning they pass no ranking authority. That's consistent, widely repeated, and probably right.
But "probably right, per secondary sources" is not the same as verified, and this entire topic is built on people repeating each other. The good news: the practical answer doesn't depend on it — the advice is identical either way.
Do Pinterest backlinks help SEO?
Not the way you've been told. Pinning your own URL is not a ranking tactic, and the argument holds regardless of the nofollow question:
- If pin links are nofollow (as reported): Google's documentation says links with that attribute "will generally not be followed." No ranking credit. Pinning 500 times achieves nothing for rankings.
- If they weren't nofollow: then Google's spam policies would describe the tactic exactly — they name "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" and "Using automated programs or services to create links to your site" as link spam.
Pointless or risky. There's no third door.
What Pinterest genuinely does is different and better: it sends real people to your site, and it puts your content in front of the kind of person who might link to it from their own blog. That second link is a real backlink. The pin is what caused it, not what was it.
What does Google actually say about nofollow links now?
Google's current documentation (last updated December 2025) says: "Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed."
That word "generally" is doing real work, and most SEO content still misses it. Since 2019 Google has treated these attributes as hints rather than absolute directives — it reserves the right to consider them. It's not a promise that a nofollow link is invisible; it's a statement that it usually won't be followed.
The same doc adds that "the linked pages may be found through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites, and thus they may still be crawled."
What this doesn't mean: that nofollow links secretly pass ranking credit and the tactic works after all. "Hint" is not a loophole. It means Google looks at the whole picture — including, as Google has said, unnatural linking patterns. Building 500 identical links to game a hint is not a clever exploit of the hint model.
Is mass-pinning my own URLs link spam?
This is the uncomfortable question, and since we sell a tool that creates pins in bulk, you should hear our answer rather than assume we have one.
Google's spam policies define link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings," and specifically name "Using automated programs or services to create links to your site." Read literally, generating hundreds of pins pointing at your own site sounds like exactly that.
The distinction is Google's own carve-out: "It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute."
So the nofollow that "ruins" Pinterest as a link source is the same nofollow that makes pinning at volume safe. And the other half of the definition matters just as much: "primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." If you're making pins to reach people who'll click them, that's not the purpose described. If you're making them to game Google, you've picked a tactic that doesn't work and matches the wording. See our own honest position.
Can Pinterest pages themselves rank in Google?
Yes — and this is the most legitimate SEO thing about Pinterest, though it's not "backlinks."
Pinterest boards and pin pages are web pages that Google can index. So a pin of yours can appear in Google results, occupying space that would otherwise go to a competitor, and sending someone to Pinterest — where your pin is — rather than nowhere.
That's real value with a real caveat: you don't own that page. It's Pinterest's page, ranking in Google, containing your content. Pinterest decides whether it exists, how it looks, and whether that continues.
Treat it as a bonus rather than a strategy. Ranking your own pages is the durable asset; a Pinterest page ranking for your topic is a nice extra that you rent rather than own.
Should I claim my website on Pinterest for SEO?
Claim it — but not for Google. The SEO benefit is roughly zero; the Pinterest benefit is real, free, and takes five minutes.
Per Pinterest's documentation, claiming "gives you insight into how often your content is shared on Pinterest," links your profile to any pins from your website, puts your profile picture alongside them, and lets people follow you from them.
The genuinely useful part is retroactive attribution: pins other people already saved from your site get connected to your profile, and you get their analytics. If your content has been quietly performing on Pinterest for two years, claiming is how you find out.
Note the requirement, because it rules a lot of people out: "To claim a website, you must own the domain, subdomain or subpath, and you need to be able to edit the source code." Marketplace sellers can't — we covered that in creating pins for an Etsy store.
How many times can I pin the same URL?
There's no published Pinterest limit we can point you to, and we're not going to invent one — that would be exactly the folklore this article argues against.
The better framing is that the number isn't the question. Pinning the same URL fifty times with the same pin is repetition. Pinning it five times with five different pins aimed at five different searches is coverage. Those look similar in a spreadsheet and are completely different on a search platform.
Pinterest's community guidelines are the constraint worth reading: "Don't create or save content that is repetitive, deceptive, or irrelevant in an attempt to make money." Note the qualifier — it's about repetitive content published to monetise, not duplicates as such.
So the test isn't a count. It's whether each pin is a genuinely different answer to a genuinely different question. If it is, you're not repeating yourself. If it isn't, no number is safe.
Do Pinterest links help with AI search and LLMs?
Honestly: nobody credibly knows, including us, and anyone selling certainty here is guessing.
What's reasonable to say: AI systems are trained on and retrieve from the open web, and Pinterest pages are part of it. What isn't reasonable is to build a strategy on speculation about how a given model weights a given link attribute — that's the same mistake as the backlink folklore, one layer newer.
Our position across this blog is consistent: if a claim has no methodology behind it, it's a claim rather than evidence — and that applies to "nofollow links matter for AI visibility" just as much as to "fresh pins get 90% of your traffic."
The durable move doesn't change: put genuinely useful things on a site you own, and get real people to them. That has survived every algorithm shift so far, and it doesn't require knowing what any model does with a rel attribute.
What's the difference between a Pinterest backlink and Pinterest traffic?
It's the difference between a tactic that doesn't work and the reason to use the platform at all.
A "backlink" in the sense people mean it is a ranking signal — a vote that lifts your position in Google. Pin links don't do that job.
Traffic is a person arriving on your site. Pin links do exactly that job, which is what they were built for.
The confusion is expensive, because it makes people optimise for the wrong thing. If you're chasing backlinks, you'll pin your URL as many times as possible and measure nothing that matters. If you're chasing traffic, you'll make pins people actually want to click — which, incidentally, is also the only route to the real backlink: someone sees your content, likes it, and links to it from their own site. That link is a genuine vote. The pin was just how they found you.
Do I need to add nofollow to links on my own site pointing to Pinterest?
No. Linking out to your own Pinterest profile is a normal editorial link — you're not paying for it, it isn't user-generated spam, and you're not trying to manipulate anything.
Google's rel attributes have specific jobs: sponsored for "links that are advertisements or paid placements," ugc for "user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts," and nofollow for "when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site."
None of those describe "here's our Pinterest profile" in your footer.
The rule of thumb: if you'd be comfortable telling Google exactly why the link is there, it doesn't need an attribute. The attributes exist for links you can't honestly vouch for.
Are Pinterest links worth anything at all then?
Yes — just not the thing they're marketed as. Ranked by how much they're actually worth:
- Referral traffic. Real people arriving on your site. This is the whole point and it's the only reason worth doing any of it.
- Discovery that earns real links. A blogger finds your infographic on Pinterest and cites it from their site. That's a backlink — and no amount of self-pinning creates it directly.
- Pinterest pages ranking in Google. Extra surface area in results, on a page you don't own.
- Attribution and analytics once you've claimed your site.
- Ranking credit from the pin link itself. Effectively nothing — and if it weren't nothing, the tactic would be spam.
Notice that the thing everyone optimises for is last, and the thing that actually pays is first. That inversion is the entire reason this article exists.
What are the myths about Pinterest backlinks?
Five that circulate constantly, and each fails on a primary source:
- "Pinterest gives you high-authority backlinks." Pin links reportedly carry nofollow, and Google says such links "will generally not be followed." Pinterest's own domain authority isn't transferable to you.
- "Pin more to build more link juice." If it worked it'd be "using automated programs or services to create links to your site" — Google's own definition of link spam.
- "Nofollow is a hint now, so it counts." A hint isn't a loophole. Google also uses links to understand unnatural linking patterns.
- "Claiming your site passes authority." It gives attribution and analytics. That's it, and it's still worth doing.
- "Group boards build backlinks." Same links, same attribute, more places.
The pattern: every myth treats Pinterest as a link source. It's a discovery source. That's a better business, just not one you can automate into a ranking.
So what should I actually do?
Stop optimising for links and start optimising for clicks, which is what the platform was built for and what actually compounds.
- Claim your website — free, five minutes, retroactive attribution and analytics.
- Pin your own URLs, several distinct pins per page, each aimed at a different search. Not for links — because each one is a different door to the same room.
- Make things worth linking to. Original data, a genuinely useful guide, a good infographic. That's what earns the real backlink from someone else's site.
- Measure outbound clicks, not "backlinks acquired." One is a real number; the other is a fiction.
- Ignore anyone selling Pinterest backlink packages. They're selling nofollow links at scale, which is either worthless or spam.
That's the whole strategy, and none of the important parts cost money.
Wrapping up
We set out to verify the one fact this entire topic rests on — that Pinterest links are nofollow — and we couldn't. It's client-side rendered, Pinterest doesn't document it, and every article asserting it is quoting another article. That's worth knowing about a subject people spend real money on.
It also turned out not to matter, which is the useful part. If pin links are nofollow, pinning for backlinks is pointless. If they aren't, Google's spam policies describe the tactic almost word for word. Pointless or risky — and no third door.
So the answer to "do Pinterest backlinks help SEO?" is: not in the way you were sold, and the way they genuinely help is better anyway. Pinterest sends real people to your site, and some of those people have websites, and a few of them will link to you from theirs. That link is an editorial vote — the only kind that ever counted. The pin was just how they found you.
Which makes the strategy pleasingly simple: claim your site, deep-link every pin to the page it promises, make several distinct pins per URL because each is a different door, make something worth citing, and count outbound clicks rather than an imaginary link total. None of the important parts cost money. The free Pinterest SEO checker will tell you whether a pin's title, description and destination all promise the same thing before you publish it. When the volume of pins becomes the constraint, generating them in bulk is what we built — for the clicks, not the links.