Originally published on KeshKesh on July 26, 2013. View the archived original.
UPDATE: As of November 15, 2013 Pinterest links appear to be nofollow again
So I was going through backlinks today using Open Site Explorer’s “Just-Discovered” feature (which is handy for finding newly found links), and I noticed that there were a lot of Pinterest links in there. What’s more, these links were all dofollow.
When Pinterest first launched, all links from the site were dofollow, but nofollow was added to all outbound links early last January. I haven’t heard anything about Pinterest links since then (possibly because I’m news-deprived since Google Reader went away), but it looks like Pinterest does have dofollow links again.
To find the links, just go to any pin in Pinterest, and examine the “Website” button at the top, and you’ll see that it’s a dofollow link.
There are no meta nofollow tags either, and the pins are not blocked by robots.txt. So it appears that Pinterest links are dofollow again! I’m not sure if this a temporary bug or an actual feature, but for now we can enjoy some link juice goodness from Pinterest again. Time to build up my Pinterest profile.