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Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E13 How to Avoid Getting Your Pinterest Account Banned or Shadowbanned (And What to Do if It Does)
01:07:32
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- [00:02]
Tony Hill
Hey, welcome to pintalk, the Go to podcast for all things Pinterest for bloggers and content creators. I'm Tony Hill and with me is my co host, Carly Campbell. So what are we talking about today, Carly?
- [00:13]
Carly Campbell
We are going to talk about account bans on Pinterest and shadow bans on Pinterest and what to do if you think that your account has been shadow banned or if you know that has been banned.
- [00:27]
Tony Hill
Yeah, so I know this is a very nuanced topic because, oh, my gosh, we haven't stopped talking about it for, like, I don't know, almost an hour here before hitting record. Because there's like, so many different scenarios and cases that we keep bringing up of different examples of the ways, you know, banning can happen and what to do about it and what does it look like and false positives. And there's a lot to unpack here. So, yeah, let's see what we can do here to help you, the listener, figure out either, like, what to do if you think you have some sort of ban going on with one of your accounts or you want to avoid it.
- [01:07]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, it's something that I think we can almost operate in, like, you know, the complete fear, because we hear about it a lot. It's important to remember that if you're in Facebook groups or forums, the loudest people are usually the people who are having trouble with something. And so we hear about it a lot. It might even feel like we hear about more account bans than we hear about accounts that are doing really well. But that would be like a natural human situation. So just because accounts do get banned doesn't mean that all accounts get banned. And as we have this conversation, I would like to encourage everybody not to become, like, so hyper vigilant that they're afraid to even pin. Because I talk to people who, you know, they'll be at one pin a day or two pins a day, and they're afraid to increase to five, lest they, you know, trip the shadow band filters. I don't think that that's healthy. We need to be able to do experiments on our Pinterest account.
- [02:08]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that's a good point. Well, so we have come up with a list of different types of bands. There may be more that we didn't think of, but I'll just go over them real quick. The high level, and then we're going to unpack each one. So we have the account level ban, and then we have a shadow ban, and then you have a domain level ban, and then individual pins and then possibly a keyword level ban. Now, the caveat to this conversation is that we do not work for Pinterest. So we don't totally know the inner workings of all the different bands and what gets triggered and how that works and how to recover from all that. We have some personal experience with some of these. There's a lot of anecdotal conversations that we've had with other Pinterest creators. We've walked through with some of these bands. And so it's just coming from that level experience. And so just wanted to give a warning that, you know, we don't. We don't know exactly how it all works and exactly what we're talking about. That could be then the case every single time for each account to totally understand what is going on. But we've got a lot of evidence, basically, I think, that we're working with and that we're going to be presenting to you on what may be going on and what you can do about it. So let's start with that first one with the account level ban. Like, what does that look like?
- [03:35]
Carly Campbell
Okay, so usually if you get a ban at the account level, you'll get an email from Pinterest that says, but we've deactivated your account. So you'll know you can't be unsure if you have an account level Ben or not. You can't access your Pinterest account. And they've generally reached out to you to let you know that for one reason or another, your account's deactivated.
- [03:59]
Tony Hill
Has that ever happened to you?
- [04:01]
Carly Campbell
Yes, it happened once in 2018, I think. @ the time I had a friend who had a friend who was her contact at Pinterest and I got her to email her contact at Pinterest and they fixed my account right away. And then it's never happened again.
- [04:21]
Tony Hill
Do you have any idea what it was?
- [04:23]
Carly Campbell
No, I have absolutely no idea. By 2018, I had pinned a lot of pregnancy and postpartum content, and there are definitely trigger words, like not to trigger humans. That would trigger a spam filter. There are definitely some words that I used. And if I had to guess, if I had to make like a completely random guess, I would say it's not unlikely that the use of some of these words could have been related to that. The content's not against Pinterest terms of service, but that doesn't mean it didn't just trip the wrong filter somewhere. Flag somewhere.
- [05:02]
Tony Hill
Okay, now for other people who have that, you know, that have had their account completely banned, There have been many who've had their account reinstated.
- [05:12]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [05:13]
Tony Hill
So what's that look like? How did they go about it? Especially if they don't have a contact or, you know, a friend of a friend who works at Pinterest?
- [05:21]
Carly Campbell
Well, I mean, the reason that Pinterest gave me my account back wasn't because I had, you know, some kind of sneaky back door. If I had been pinning content that was against their terms of service, I'm sure they would not have given me that account back. The only reason they did it was because it's actually super common that a word that is, you know, used in one context, but could also be used in another context, or an image that looks one way to Pinterest but is actually not an image of that thing at all, or whatever. These things can, you know, trip spam flags, spam filters. And when a human looks at the content, they can see that this account isn't actually violating terms of service. And we've, we've heard stories of thousands of accounts over the years where people have had their account deactivated and then gotten it back by being persistent with contacting a human at Pinterest. So there's actually an appeal form on Pinterest website. We could even find that and put it a link to the contact in the show notes. But just appealing one time if you know that you haven't violated the terms of service is often not enough. You can email again and again and keep trying. If you have violated the terms of service, if you read through the community guidelines and you see that you have done something that is in violation of those, I would not bother emailing again and again because you're not likely to get your account back. In that case, you know, when a human finally does look at it.
- [06:58]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Well, what do you think of the situation where you realize, okay, maybe I have violated one of these community guidelines or terms of service and you maybe just tell them, okay, I won't do it again. I pinky promise. Have you seen that work? Because I've seen some people where they, they've been transparent. They just owned up to, okay, here's where I think maybe I took things too far. As an example, Baby was pinning way too many pins and repinning them all for the same URL. And people were not saving them and they were just going crazy with it and just owning up to that in the email that they send to Pinterest and to let them know, here's where I messed up and I promise not to do it.
- [07:43]
Carly Campbell
Again, I mean, I think it's completely worth a try.
- [07:46]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [07:46]
Carly Campbell
I think that this is, like, I have absolutely no basis for saying this. To me, it seems more likely that you would get your account back if the violation that you've committed is something like what you're talking about. Like, I pinned the same URL a hundred times back to back. I didn't realize I shouldn't do that. I'm sorry. Versus if you saved something explicit. I think that you're probably more likely to get your account back in one case than another. But it definitely worth trying.
- [08:14]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, they're definitely legit spammers on Pinterest who should have their account completely banned and never reinstated. But I do see a lot of good accounts that get caught up in their little algorithm that they release. And we'll run through all these accounts to see if there's anything that they should be banned for. And that's happened with me on some levels where they just Pinterest admitted, like, sorry, you got. You got caught up.
- [08:45]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. You get account that just got.
- [08:48]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [08:49]
Carly Campbell
Spammed. Yeah. It's absolutely worth appealing it for sure. I mean, even if you can't identify the thing that you've done wrong. Or maybe especially if you can't identify the thing you've done wrong.
- [08:59]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So how many appeals would you personally send before you just throw in the towel?
- [09:07]
Carly Campbell
Well, I actually believe that with a lot of content and a good established understanding of how Pinterest works works, I actually think that it'd be pretty easy to start a new account. So I would. I would try to appeal five, six times. And. And if they won't reinstate my account, I just start a new one. That's how I feel about it these days. But I have talked to people who have sent seven emails before they got a response. Seven is a number that I have heard a couple times.
- [09:40]
Tony Hill
Okay. We were talking about this before we recorded, and I was asking you a question, and you didn't know the answer, and I didn't know the answer. Maybe a listener does. And that is when your account gets banned, does the domain go down with it? Like, does it stay associated with that account? And then that domain is forever locked into that banned account, and you can't set up a new account and verify it with your original domain name.
- [10:07]
Carly Campbell
So I'm confident that happens some of the time. I don't know if it happens 100% of the time.
- [10:12]
Tony Hill
Ah, I see.
- [10:13]
Carly Campbell
And I would like to know, because I have had an account, not an account that got banned that I could never get back, but I had an account, I purchased this website and the owner couldn't get into the Pinterest account. So the domain was like manually locked into an account that I couldn't access. And Pinterest was able to help me verify it just by proving I own the website to them. And so just having your domain like stuck in an account shouldn't be a problem. But if there's a flag attached to that domain, then obviously Pinterest isn't going to help you clean that. So I, I would like to know, is it flagged a hundred percent of the time if your account is shut down?
- [10:57]
Tony Hill
Right.
- [10:58]
Carly Campbell
And I don't know.
- [10:59]
Tony Hill
Yeah, I don't, I don't know either. Because to your point, you can go create a new account and with domain names these days, for privacy sake, it's not going to show publicly the name and address associated with that domain name through the whois. Right. And so Pinterest doesn't know exactly what's going on with that domain name. You could just say, hey, I, I just bought this domain name and I realized like, I can't register with Pinterest for some reason. And then support will realize, oh, that's because it's associated with a banned account. And then Pinterest doesn't know if that's true or not. I'm not saying like go lie, but it's just kind of pointing out the fact that they wouldn't necessarily know.
- [11:38]
Carly Campbell
Right.
- [11:38]
Tony Hill
And so would they really hold a domain name ransom?
- [11:42]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. I do not know. I am very curious.
- [11:44]
Tony Hill
I would at least try it. I mean, it depends on the value of that domain name. And if you're getting traffic still to it from other sources, you've got a lot of content and you got a brand behind it.
- [11:55]
Carly Campbell
Well, and actually I do know that there are situations where you will get an account level ban, but your domain is not banned. And in those situations you will see, you'll still see traffic in like Google Analytics or whatever analytics monitoring platform you're using. You'll still see traffic from Pinterest, but it's coming from others pins, not your pins, because your pins will be stopped from distribution. Your pins will not be sending traffic, but third party pins that have been created to your website when your domain isn't blocked can still send traffic. And so it's an argument that I've heard people use for having a second Pinterest account for their website that's not claimed that still pins regularly for their own website.
- [12:45]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that's true. That's a. That's a good argument. Yeah. So account bans are kind of scary. Uh, I've never received an email for one, but there's just so many various reasons why that can happen. It seems like whenever someone in one of our communities posts that their account was banned, it's like the first question people are asking is, like, how many pins per day were you doing? You know, how many unique URLs? Do you see any strong correlation with, like, say, volume pending and account bans?
- [13:18]
Carly Campbell
Um, recently? No, not really. I think that Pinterest tells us very clearly in their. I think it's in the community guidelines. They tell us very clearly that being irrelevant and repetitive is dangerous to our counts. But they're not just looking at singular aspects when they're seeing irrelevant and repetitive because they know they're. They're not stupid. They know that 15 different images can have the same title and not be irrelevant or repetitive if they're different images. So we can't just say that spinning a certain number contributes to a ban. I think we've talked about this before on the podcast. I think that this idea of a specific number can lead to a ban. But when that number is the same image going to the same URL with the same title, and now you've pinned 50 of them, now that's super different than when you've pinned 50 different images going to the same URL, and then it becomes different again. If you do exactly the same thing tomorrow and. And exactly the same thing the next day, it's different. If, then, you know, like, If I pin 50 images for one blog post today, 50 is more than I pin or would recommend anybody pin. But it's just an example. If I pin 50 for one blog post today and I do 50 different images, but then tomorrow I do 50 more images for the same URL, and the next day I do 50 more images for the SAME URL, and the next day I DO 50. Eventually, we become repetitive. I think, even if the images are all different. I don't know any successful websites that are based on one URL pinned a thousand times. I don't know a single one. Right. So, I mean, generally, I think that the issues arise when people try to take these things to extremes. I think that approaching Pinterest with a moderate attitude towards volume and frequency is always safer. What do you think about that?
- [15:33]
Tony Hill
Yeah, so I've seen people who they've heard from, like, someone like me who's doing 48 pens a day, or even other people who talk about doing a hundred pens a day. And so they're gonna try to take a whack at it, and they create a single recipe on their blog, and they're trying to figure out how they can do 48 pens for that single recipe. And that's when they run into trouble where there's some misguided advice or they're just not taking the time to pay closer attention to what warrants, you know, being able to create so many pens for a single URL and what doesn't. And so I could just see some people just innocently kind of jumping into the deep end before they've had a chance to have some. Some lessons here.
- [16:23]
Carly Campbell
This was the number one thing that, when I didn't know you, when you were talking about, you know, pinning fifty or a hundred pins a day, a year ago, maybe it's more than a year ago now, the number one thing that people were coming to me about was, how is he allowed to pin that volume of pins if I'm not allowed to pin that volume of pins? And finally I started to. I. I've used the example on this podcast before, my toddler Halloween costumes example, because I had to find a way to explain to people with a really easy example the idea of how you can have 50 images that are different that can go to the same URL that are not the same idea. And I really think that in that example, when we are seeing it's very difficult to pin 50 pins for one recipe without being irrelevant or redundant. And I think that the whole solution to not being banned based on volume lies in understanding of what is irrelevant and what is repetitive, and it's not in a specific number. So we can't, we can't give people.
- [17:34]
Tony Hill
That number because I know of people who are doing the max. I think it's like 200 a day that you can do, and they're doing really well with it day after day, 200 pins a day, no problems. But they understand how to create pens that Pinterest users really want to engage with.
- [17:53]
Carly Campbell
And I bet they're adding new URLs all the time. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's the other thing. You know, it's very difficult to create pins at that scale. And a lot of people are doing their websites by themselves. They don't have a lot of help. And so when we make that shift from pinning a reasonable amount of pins to wanting to try to do high volume just because we heard that we could. There tends to be a decrease in focus on content creation. And now we are being repetitive with our URLs because we're not introducing new URLs often enough. And I think that leads to shadow bans just as often, you know, pinning the same URL 2000, 3000 times in a year. Like I said, even if you have a lot of different images for it, you're still being repetitive at some level, you know.
- [18:42]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [18:43]
Carly Campbell
So I think it's safer to pin more if you have more URLs coming in more often.
- [18:49]
Tony Hill
Yeah. You mentioned shadowban. So that's the next one.
- [18:51]
Carly Campbell
Oh, we hadn't gotten to that one yet.
- [18:53]
Tony Hill
Yeah, no, that's the next one here on our list. But good timing. So, yeah, shadow ban. What does that look like compared to an account ban?
- [19:02]
Carly Campbell
Well, with the account ban, you get that email where Pinterest says, we've deactivated your account with a shadow ban. And I use that term carefully because I think that that term gets thrown around a lot when it shouldn't be. But a shadow ban is, you know, Pinterest not going to distribute your content if it's a limited, very limited reach on your account, but they don't give you any indication that it's limited reach. You might notice one day, you know, you used to, your account used to be growing and then you wake up one day and it's dropped to almost zero. And no matter what you do, it stays at almost zero. Sometimes there could be an argument made that your account is shadowbanned.
- [19:46]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So what about accounts say they're getting like 5,000 outbound clicks a day. It drops. Maybe it slowly drops down over the course of a month or two to like a thousand a day, which is a pretty good sized drop, right?
- [20:02]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [20:02]
Tony Hill
Would you say that's a shadow ban?
- [20:05]
Carly Campbell
There's so many questions to ask in that situation. It slowly dropped down over a month. I don't know, it's maybe not a shadow ban. My gut would say if it's dropped slowly like that over the course of a month, it's less likely to be a shadow ban than if it dropped immediately, overnight from 5,000. And even in that situation, I would want to know how long have we maintained 5,000?
- [20:29]
Tony Hill
Right. Yeah, I was just thinking about that. So say it's like a pretty consistent 5,000 for a year or more, and then all of a sudden things drop. Now there are algorithm updates. Right. So that's a factor too. And how often those happen, we don't totally Know, I would imagine that there's updates happening all the time, but they're minor. Right. Then sometimes they'll do big ones, you know, every. Every couple months or so. It just can fluctuate sometimes.
- [20:58]
Carly Campbell
So I don't ever refer to the minor algorithm updates as algorithm updates. I call them shuffles because I think they're a natural part of Pinterest's like, keyword usage. I think they, they're literally just like adjusting the way that they treat keywords. It actually doesn't have anything to do with, or little to do with the content that they're choosing to display there. Like, when we talk about Google algorithm updates, we're usually talking about Google's personal opinion of our content. Whereas in the case of a Pinterest shuffle, I really don't think it has anything to do with our content and everything to do with what Pinterest thinks of a certain brand, keyword or cluster of keywords and how they're treating them and how they're distributing them and how they're suggesting them or not suggesting them to people. Your content might still be completely relevant for this keyword that it was relevant for before, but that keyword doesn't have the same place in Pinterest's ecosystem as it used to. So these shuffles that happen, I don't think of them as reflections on me or my account all the time. I mean, maybe I think the algorithm updates are more often reflections on an account than the shuffles. So the little like they're almost like bi weekly or monthly, the adjustments that we see or hear about. And if you go down in one of those, I still, most of the time would hesitate to tell anybody that your account has been shadow banned. You just lost the shuffle. That's what I have called it for years and years. You're shuffled loser versus shuffle winner.
- [22:36]
Tony Hill
Yep. Yeah. And Pinterest is constantly trying to improve their algorithms and make each pin more relevant to each user. Right. And so as they make updates to their different AI models through all sorts of training data that they're constantly collecting, then I expect, yeah, there will be shifts and when it's going to show certain pens to certain types of people. But also what we've seen even more recently is what can happen during the holiday season. Right. So if I've seen some accounts where they were doing really well through like Christmas, and then right after Christmas, starting like January 1st, it looks like the account was shadow banned.
- [23:23]
Carly Campbell
Right. But in that situation, I would tell people it's unlikely that it's A shadow ban. It's just a seasonal shift. And actually on one of my accounts is really funny. Funny ha ha, because, like, you can see that giant January drop. But if you actually drill down individually on what pins are still getting impressions, the seasonal pins will actually still be getting disproportionate impressions, but nobody's clicking on them because it's not Christmas anymore. Right? And so, I mean, they're not getting the impressions they were getting before, but they're still getting more impressions that I'd like them to be getting. And the reason I say that is because now people are seeing them and not engaging with them. And the longer that goes on, that does start to affect my account on a bigger level. So it can almost be like the price you pay for doing really, really well through Christmas. And, you know, the whole of quarter four, because now engagement is decreasing on your account. It's not even really your fault. This is something that I'm dealing with on one of my accounts right now. But I'm still seeing that seasonal things, seasonally relevant things that go out now still get impressions. And so that's one thing that I would look at. You know, if you have this giant drop and you're trying to determine, was this just a shuffle or is this a shadow ban? Well, do the new seasonally relevant things you put out do at least marginally better than the new things that you put out that maybe don't have that seasonal aspect because. Cause you would expect them to if they were going to a strong board.
- [25:11]
Tony Hill
Right. And sometimes there are cases where people just may not realize that the pen that they put out there might just be naturally suppressed by Pinterest right now because they don't find it seasonally relevant. So you had a good example of that with the fireplace.
- [25:29]
Carly Campbell
Oh, the Christmas. Okay, so, yes, we talked about this in From a home Decor perspective, and I was. I was saying, I think that there's a lot of instances where we'll have this content that's doing remarkably well or marginally well even through a season. And we don't think of it as seasonal content. We don't think like, this is my Christmas content. We think this is my good evergreen content. Look at how well it's performing through the season. That's great. And then it'll die right off in January, and we'll feel like, well, that wasn't seasonal content, so it must be shadow banned now, because it makes sense that it was evergreen then. It should be evergreen now. But I can see this drop. But if you Think about, and I use home decor and living rooms, for example. And if you've got an evergreen picture of a living room and it has a fireplace with a lit fire in it, and nothing else about the picture and nothing about the picture period, so says seasonal, you know, Christmas. There are so many pictures of Christmassy living rooms with lit fireplaces in them that do so well in quarter four that Pinterest will make a connection between your lit fireplace and those lit fireplaces. And as we go out of the Christmas season, your completely evergreen living room with its lit fireplace could see massive decrease based on Pinterest's interpretation of its seasonality, even if you don't see its seasonality. And the same is true for anything else where Pinterest might make a connection across a season. You know, if you've got a baby shower food pin and it's got a table and the watermelon is really prominent there, and, you know, so is everything else. And in your mind, there's no way that that's a summer pin, especially if it's performed well. The better something performs, the more connections Pinterest makes with other, like, content. So particularly if it's performed really well and fall comes and it dies right out, you might be left scratching your head, like, okay, well, you know, this is completely dead. My account's shadowbanned. It's very bad. But really all that happened was Pinterest had established a really strong relationship between your pin and the summer words, because watermelon is a summer concept, whether you like it or not. And so there's a lot of situations that I see where people assume a shadow ban, where one does not exist.
- [28:09]
Tony Hill
Okay. Yeah. And the downside is that Pinterest analytics doesn't make it easy to identify a lot of these pins that have dropped. I think it's really important to understand the pins that have dropped so you can study them, look for clues, look for patterns. I've created a Google sheet to do this where you can run a report on a time period where your account was doing well right before the drop and export that out of Pinterest analytics and then run a more recent report, export that, and then it combines the data and then it will highlight which pins dropped and by how much. With your outbound clicks, it does it.
- [28:50]
Carly Campbell
Based on pins, not at the pin level. Post URL. That's cool.
- [28:55]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So I shared this in my Maverick forum. So if you remember my forum, do a search over there for maybe Pinterest Shadowban tool. It might be in, like, one of the areas where we share our tools and resources. So check that out. Or you can do it yourself. Based on what, How I just described it. You'll just have to probably work with chat. ChatGPT to help you figure it out. But it's a really helpful practice to understand exactly which pins dropped.
- [29:19]
Carly Campbell
I mean, I regularly open my top 50 pins in their own window, and I'm regularly looking at them, so I can always identify which of my pins drop.
- [29:31]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [29:32]
Carly Campbell
Because if I do it again a week later, I should know. I really think that everybody should be doing that, But I know that people don't do that.
- [29:38]
Tony Hill
Yeah. I mean, there are people like you who are just allergic to spreadsheets. So you're just gonna log in and eyeball it. Yeah. As long as you understand what's going on to the best of your ability with it. Cause I've seen accounts where, honestly, they just weren't getting a whole lot of traffic to begin with. It felt like a lot. It was a newer account, say three or four months old, maybe getting a couple hundred clicks a day, and then all of a sudden, things drop. And I went and looked at their account, and maybe I saw, like, a screenshot of the analytics or they gave me access to it. And in reality, it was maybe a handful or maybe a dozen pins that was supporting all of that traffic. And there was just a natural shuffle. Right. For some of the reasons that we've already talked about. And there's really nothing they did wrong in those cases.
- [30:27]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. And that's really common. And we. We talked about this earlier. So one of the things that does make me lean towards, you know, if somebody comes to me and says, is this account shadow banned versus is it not? Now, we cannot tell for sure, but one of the things that makes me lean towards, yes, it might be shadowbanned is the number of pins you have, just so disproportionate to the number of views you don't have. So when I see an account that has 10,000 pins, 15,000 pins, and they're getting 82,000 impressions, I lean towards like, okay, maybe this is shadow banned. Because the more pins you have, the more pins that you have that could be out there, and it's not uncommon for an account to have a small handful of pins that are carrying their weight. So in the situation of this account that you're talking about, the smaller account, maybe they only had a handful of pins carrying their weight. That's not uncommon all the way along. But the longer you go, you'll also Start to have a good number of pins that are getting a trickle of traffic. And over time, your trickle is what should kind of grow your baseline. It's not usually those, like, viral takeoff ones that. That really add to your baseline. They're kind of just like bonus traffic. And so if I see an account with 15,000 pins and they don't even have a baseline trickle, I tend to think this account might be shadowbanned versus an account with 1000 pins that's getting 82,000 views. I tend to think, like, oh, this account maybe hasn't hit that many winners yet, or they had seasonal winners, and now they don't. And so there's no hard number, you know, when that becomes a good measuring stick. But it's definitely one that. That I use.
- [32:18]
Tony Hill
Yeah. A thousand pens for an account is kind of my minimum baseline on if I'm going to give them my opinion on what I think is going on. If they don't have more than a thousand, then it's almost up to the wind on what could have happened, because it just had so few pens that probably didn't get wide enough distribution to really understand what's going on.
- [32:41]
Carly Campbell
Well, and a thousand pins in one niche is actually also very different than a thousand pins in another niche. If you've got a thousand pins in one of the most popular Pinterest niches, I would have different expectations for that than if you had a thousand pins in one of the least popular Pinterest niches. And so there's no baseline. I mean, certainly a thousand is a good starting point, but. But I think there's some niches where with a thousand pins, you know, if they're getting a hundred views, maybe that's all they should expect from a thousand pins.
- [33:17]
Tony Hill
Oh, I see.
- [33:18]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. Like, so, I mean, maybe these niches need to get to 10,000 pins before we could even hope to have a thousand pages a day. I don't know what these niches are off the top of my head, but I'm just saying it's not fair to. I don't think expect a thousand pins about gerbils to be getting the same kind of traffic as a thousand pins about cheeseburgers. So I think there's just fewer people have gerbils than the people who make cheeseburgers.
- [33:46]
Tony Hill
Yeah, okay, that's a good point. All right, so if you think you've been shadowbanned, what are some next steps? What would you recommend?
- [33:53]
Carly Campbell
Just, like, it's difficult for us to determine with any kind of certainty whether or not A count Shadow banned. I don't think Pinterest support can tell either.
- [34:02]
Tony Hill
Interesting.
- [34:03]
Carly Campbell
So contacting Pinterest support.
- [34:05]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [34:05]
Carly Campbell
Is I know a handful of people who have had positive results that way, but I know just as many or more that have been told over and over again they don't have a shadow ban, and I think they do. So I would cast a very critical eye over your content to try to determine what Pinterest may not have liked about it. And I would start a new account.
- [34:30]
Tony Hill
Wow. Okay.
- [34:31]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, that's where I've landed now. So I've never said that like, you know, prior to, you're so quick till.
- [34:37]
Tony Hill
We start a new account.
- [34:40]
Carly Campbell
I've never started a new account.
- [34:42]
Tony Hill
Yeah, yeah, it feels like a lot of work. But if it's purely just to setting up a new account, you get to keep the website or would you set up a whole new website and domain?
- [34:51]
Carly Campbell
So I have looked at Shadowbann accounts where over and over and over again we have identified words that I think could be problematic for Pinterest in the URLs. And so in those situations, I mean, even if keep the website, I certainly wouldn't be pinning all the same URLs. You know, if you've got words that you think might be problematic in, in your URLs, then you'll need, you'll need new ones. So I mean, I think that's a case by case basis to be able to answer that question. Yeah.
- [35:26]
Tony Hill
Oh, you know, that reminds me, there's one thing that I don't think we've talked about yet that people will often refer to when they think they've had their account banned or shadow banned. Basically they're running multiple Pinterest accounts and they were concerned that, like Pinterest didn't like that. Right. So they were using the same IP address and the same browser and jumping between several accounts.
- [35:47]
Carly Campbell
So this is if their account actually gets shut down. Like a account level ban.
- [35:52]
Tony Hill
I hear it most commonly with shadow bans, really, where people are concerned about having multiple accounts. And maybe Pinterest didn't like that. And I've heard of people having multiple accounts both getting shadow banned around the same time. I know there's a lot of nuance there of like, why that could happen. I can see it in your face.
- [36:09]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, yeah. I mean, for argument's sake, let's say they're not shadow banned at all. Let's say that they're just pitting similar content on both accounts and that content is being treated differently. By Pinterest now.
- [36:20]
Tony Hill
Right.
- [36:20]
Carly Campbell
And therefore both accounts are going to.
- [36:22]
Tony Hill
Go down or they just have a really bad strategy that they're applying to multiple accounts.
- [36:25]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, yeah. It. There's always that risk when you're one person. I once read a really interesting quote that said, like, all these website owners starting multiple websites, thinking that they've diversified. And then the person who said it was like, yeah, if you're running all of them, you haven't done anything. You've just divided your efforts between and. And like, that's true. Because if you're applying exactly the same strategy, whatever is going to happen that's going to damage this property, if it's all the same strategy building up the next property is equally likely to be damaged by whatever happens, you know, if it's an algorithmic thing or whatever. So I don't know. My gut feeling is that if you're running multiple accounts from the same IP address and Pinterest doesn't like that, they're far more likely to ban your accounts outright than just decrease distribution of your content. That's my gut. What do you think about that?
- [37:27]
Tony Hill
Honestly, I'm not super concerned about it because it's just so common to have multiple. So I'm also thinking about having a virtual assistant help with managing your Pinterest account.
- [37:40]
Carly Campbell
Yep.
- [37:41]
Tony Hill
And so it can be very common for multiple people to be logging in and out of an account, especially from different locations. So different IP addresses, different countries. And there are a lot of Pinterest as a service companies out there. Right. Like agencies and individuals who provide this. So this service to multiple accounts. And now, of course, Pinterest does have a way to. To do that officially through like creating the agency account and having different partners and that you can connect these accounts to. I don't know. I think that they're smart enough to recognize patterns, whereas they're afraid that there could be some sort of automation or bots that are creating all these pins with multiple accounts coming from different IP addresses and they'll be able to better recognize those and flag those kind of accounts. But if you are just a normal human being, maybe you've got a couple of VAs that are you with your Pinterest account? I wouldn't be concerned about it. I've had people helping me with my Pinterest accounts for years from different locations and we've like literally shared the same login for a long time. Yeah, it has not been a problem because we weren't scaling it out to tons of different accounts creating terrible Pins and, you know, spamming, that kind of stuff.
- [38:52]
Carly Campbell
Right, right, I agree. And also, I think that it's rarely when you're talking about a shadow ban, like an account ban, it can be one thing that you did that like, seems to trip that, like one IP address that creates a whole bunch of accounts at one time that can trip an account ban. But when you're talking about a shadow ban, I believe it's not as simple as on or off. I believe in like this idea of a, a weighted everything and you know, you get, you get this kind of weight and, oh, that tips your account in the direction of less distribution and then you get this much more weight and it tips your account in the further direction of less distribution. And I believe that that can be counterbalanced with insane engagement on some pins. You know, you get that, oh, now you're back here. It's a balance. I believe that it's a balance as far as shadow banning goes. And so, I mean, maybe somewhere as part of that scale, it's like, oh, there's multiple people logging in here. But I firmly believe that usually if that's going to cause an issue for your account, the issue that it's going to cause is usually an account level ban. I think, I think shadowban is often more of a function of the community guidelines and Pinterest trying to limit the content that's going out that they don't believe is good content, rather than like specific violation of policies. Does that make sense?
- [40:26]
Tony Hill
Yeah, yeah. And I've seen people throw out some other ideas for why maybe they were shadowbanned, such as using too many AI images. Right. Like, we have good evidence that Pinterest is able to track some types of AI images. Not all of them, certain kinds.
- [40:47]
Carly Campbell
But we also have evidence that there's lots of accounts that are using AI images doing really well. And so it can't be a singular. That can't be the singular reason.
- [40:54]
Tony Hill
Right, but is it a dial, like one of those weights?
- [40:57]
Carly Campbell
Right, right, maybe. But I would say that if AI images are the reason that your account got banned, the most likely, like pinpointable cause for that is that you're doing it in a niche where people didn't like it and the users reported them and you got too many reports on your account. And that could explain why this account might get banned or shadow banned, but this account doesn't. And it could be down to the end users because Pinterest relies heavily on negative feedback.
- [41:28]
Tony Hill
Oh, yeah, we forgot to mention that. We forgot to mention that. Like you could just get reported enough.
- [41:33]
Carly Campbell
Right.
- [41:34]
Tony Hill
And that could lead to an account ban.
- [41:36]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [41:36]
Tony Hill
Or potentially a shadow ban. You think or you think with that kind of reporting? Or if you get a too many pins that people report, well, they just maybe. Shadow ban, you versus account ban. I mean, we're just guessing here. We don't.
- [41:50]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, we don't work for pen. I have to think about that for a long time. I know that being reported 4, 5, 6 times absolutely does not affect a pin's ability to rank. I know that because it's in the source code and you can check it, you can see, you know, if PIN's been reported. I've seen them ranking. But there probably is a number on that, right? Yeah, we don't know what that number is. But I would if, you know, if I was Pinterest, I think that setting a hard number on that is a necessity. You know, if 150 people reported this piece of content, I'd probably be crazy to keep putting it out there and relying on my computers to try to determine that it's safe, even though everybody's telling me that it's not safe. So. Yeah, so, yeah, I think that that could be part of it. But if you're feeling like, oh, these AI images are the problem, truly, actually, as far as shadow bands go, it might not even be a reporting issue. Like, people are reporting me and that's a problem. It might be that my AI images are poor and people aren't engaging with them. And so lack of engagement can lead to what looks like a shadow ban. Right. But it's actually just lack of engagement. Why would Pinterest keep distributing your content when nobody's engaging with it?
- [43:17]
Tony Hill
Right, yeah, that's a good point. And another one I've seen is someone switches to a third party scheduler and then they see their traffic drop pretty shortly after that. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit.
- [43:30]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, I built a business on it once, nine years ago that was like the cornerstone of my Pinterest strategy was that manual pinning outperformed scheduled pinning in 2016. I think that there's lots of arguments to be made for why, if I was Pinterest and I was moving to, you know, distribution models that were completely AI controlled, why would I trust mass pinned out pins without any, like, human input over pins that were humanly pinned? So my logic is that it makes sense that Pinterest would trust manual pins more. But on this whole, like, weighted scale, it's very clear that our accounts can have some kind of level of trust with the platform where we can totally use the third party scheduler without detriment. I think that people see their accounts drop when they move to a third party scheduler because there is that disassociation. There is that one step. It might just start with one step, one step back from the attention and the detail that you were paying when it. When it was manual. And maybe that goes fine at first, and then the next thing you know, you're two steps back from the attention and the detail that you were paying to your manually scheduled pins. I think that very often if we look at the accounts that are using third party schedulers and they're doing it very successfully, we'll find that a lot of those people maintained the attention to detail that was being paid to each of their pins when they were being manually pinned, and therefore they didn't see a dope. I think that it's rarely just the use of a third party scheduler that contributes to a drop. I think there's some times when, like, maybe your scale was already like this and then you hooked up the third party schedule and it was the straw that broke the camel's back. But I think those are more the exception than the rule.
- [45:36]
Tony Hill
Okay, that makes sense. So we're gonna go a little bit out of order. I think it would be good if we talk about individual pins. Cause we kind of already hinted on that a little bit. Talked about a little bit here on like individual pins. What comes to mind for me is you can have individual pens that are. Are banned. Like they lose distribution within the platform all of a sudden. And that there could be good reasons, just normal. Sometimes, like they just run their course. Right. And then other times they can get flagged in some way. Right. Like user reported. And I mean, what are some other ways that individual pens can kind of be banned? And of course, there's actually this happened to me recently. A pen was flagged because of a reason that I could see how their AI thought the image was not appropriate. But it really was fine. It just was falsely. And so they actually ended up reinstating it, but I went ahead and deleted it anyway so I wouldn't have to deal with that again.
- [46:41]
Carly Campbell
Oh, right. Okay. So you saw it in the reports and violations.
- [46:44]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that's right.
- [46:45]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, yeah. So underneath your dropdown menu, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna open it and look at it. So I'm not misleading anybody. But if you go to your Pinterest, like your home screen, the dropdown menu on the upper right this is on desktop. I don't do anything on my phone. And you scroll down there. The 1, 2, 3. The fourth option down is the Reports and Violations Center. And if you have any pins that Pinterest is actively letting you know or that you know, the community has told Pinterest, feels that they are in violation of the terms of service, then you'll like, have details about that PIN there. And there's like three little dots where you can click to appeal that decision. And I personally think it's really important to appeal those decisions, especially when your content is actually innocent content. Because surely that adds to the weight on our scale, those pins that are, you know, violations. And deleting it seems like a really good idea too. I think that that's really smart. We recently posted a post that I was really excited to see how it does on Pinterest. This is one of those things where I'm saying, like, when you should cast a critical eye over your account, get your friend to cast a critical eye over your account, read through the whole terms of Service and the community guidelines, and then do this. Now that I'm thinking about this post from a critical robot perspective, I'm thinking maybe I should delete this post, even though I haven't even had a chance to see how it'll perform on Pinterest. Just because we do want to be careful not to be careless about those things that could very easily contribute to the weighted scale. And I think that anything in your reports and violations center is something that should be deleted regardless of if. Yeah. If it's innocent or not.
- [48:40]
Tony Hill
Yep. So you kind of alluded to this earlier, but basically there are what we can call, like I call them status codes that Pinterest will assign to a PIN for various reasons. And one of those is because of sensitive text, which you've talked about, right?
- [49:00]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [49:00]
Tony Hill
So certain like words or phrases that you use that Pinterest finds sensitive. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean it will always limit its distribution in the platform, but it is flagged.
- [49:14]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. So I do think that the ones that, that have flags are usually limited in distribution in the home feed. I don't believe that it prevents them ranking. That's. That's my belief.
- [49:25]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [49:25]
Carly Campbell
But I have nothing to back that up, so. Well, I mean, I can prove. I can prove that they rank. I can't prove that the distribution is, you know, any more or less than what it would have been otherwise, other than personal experience.
- [49:40]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [49:41]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. So there are these codes on the back ends of some pins, PINTEREST puts it in as a reason to no index. But we don't know necessarily if they're talking. Well, we know that they can't be talking about indexing on their own platform because we've seen them ranking.
- [50:01]
Tony Hill
Yep.
- [50:02]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. But we don't know what Pinterest does as far as the distribution of these pins goes. And we also don't know what all the flags mean, which is really frustrating. We do know that a flag's meaning doesn't have to be static. So I have had a pin, a board, a whole board, where every single pin on this board was flagged and the board was really performing poorly. And I meant to delete it.
- [50:30]
Tony Hill
Okay.
- [50:31]
Carly Campbell
But I didn't get around to deleting it because I had a few old pins that used to be really strong on it. And I was trying to decide if I would move those pins to a different board. But because of their flag, I was also afraid to move them to another strong board because I was afraid to infect my other strong boards with this flag. So I was thinking about making a new board just for them to see what happened. Anyway, on December 5, overnight traffic returned to a handful of the pins on that board. And so now, you know, we know that the flags don't prevent ranking completely. We know that the flags aren't treated in a 100% static way. Somewhere someone flipped a switch or something on my scale tipped, and those pins were allowed back out, certainly not just in a search. I would say they're being distributed in the home feed. Ooh. I would say they're being distributed in the home feedback despite the flag.
- [51:31]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Yeah, interesting.
- [51:34]
Carly Campbell
So, I mean, that said, we've seen some flags that seem very nefarious. You've seen flags that say blacklisted.
- [51:42]
Tony Hill
Blacklisted straight up.
- [51:44]
Carly Campbell
I would delete those.
- [51:45]
Tony Hill
I sure did.
- [51:46]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [51:47]
Tony Hill
As soon as I saw it.
- [51:48]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, I would delete those right away.
- [51:50]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Because there's. That there's issues. It can be flagged because of the link for that pin, whatever the URL that it's linking to. There's. There's could be multiple issues with that. There could be issues with what's in the image itself. So there's a free tool that I made called Flagged Pins. Com. We'll link it up here that you can use where you put in your Pinterest account, and it's going to show you, like, all the pins that were flagged on as it's going to run through all the pins in your account. And it's going to see which ones were flagged and give you kind of a reason why they may have been flagged. So check that out and see. And now it's been interesting. I've shared this with my community and people have been plugging their accounts in. It's all over the place with what it means. So just know. The caveat says like we don't know exactly what this all means. We just find it really fascinating that these pins have been flagged for various reasons. I've seen people where they used my tool and it showed like 90 something percent of their pins were flagged, but their account is just fine. And I've seen the opposite where like their account was shadow banned and they had 90% of their, you know, so it's, it's all over the place and I don't know exactly what it means. Now for myself, my own accounts, if a pin is flagged in any way, I, I'm just getting rid of it right now.
- [53:16]
Carly Campbell
Interesting. So one of my new accounts, it doesn't have a lot of flag pins because it's new and it's a pretty benign niche. But every single pin that links to a URL that has the word kiss in it is flagged. And there are some niches where we would just have to accept that all of these words that we're going to use in this, in this niche are going to have some kind of flag. Now, I believe that there are probably flags that are worse for your account than others. We can't know. I think those blacklisted ones, I think that sounds pretty scary. The sensitive raw pin text, if you plug it in, you see a ton of that. I don't worry so much about that one. We know for a fact that pins can rank with the sensitive raw pin text flag. I think that it's likely distribution is limited.
- [54:08]
Tony Hill
Yep. And that was the case that I saw where those accounts had almost all their pins were flagged.
- [54:13]
Carly Campbell
It was sensitive.
- [54:14]
Tony Hill
It was all sensitive text. Yeah.
- [54:16]
Carly Campbell
And I believe that that flag is probably much less of a big deal than some of the others. Some of the link score ones, the ones that have the word link in it, you know, if I was fighting with an account that I believed was shadow banned and I was seeing a lot of flag pins that have the word link in it, I might start asking myself like, okay, is the problem my domain and not my pins or my strategy? And we don't know. I don't know the answer to that question, but I would have to ask that. If pinterest is suggesting that the problem here is with the link.
- [54:53]
Tony Hill
One of them was like link, and it had something to do with ads.
- [54:57]
Carly Campbell
Oh.
- [54:58]
Tony Hill
On your site. And another one was like malware or like MP3s. It's weird. It's. I don't know. Again, we don't work for Pinterest, so we don't totally understand what these all mean.
- [55:10]
Carly Campbell
I saw one this week that really blew my mind, and it was other.
- [55:16]
Tony Hill
That's awesome.
- [55:16]
Carly Campbell
I've never seen that one before. I don't have any pins flagged other.
- [55:20]
Tony Hill
Okay.
- [55:20]
Carly Campbell
On my account. Yeah, just. Problem. It's just like Pinterest things.
- [55:24]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [55:25]
Carly Campbell
Problem. I don't know. I mean, I think it's interesting to look using the Flagged Pins tool to look and ask myself, has every single pin that I've ever pinned to this URL been flagged? Because I've seen that now on my. On this new account, you have two. Okay, so then we're seeing a problem where, like, maybe the problem's not on Pinterest. Right. Maybe it comes over here. But actually, this one that was other. Somebody showed it to me this week, and every pin that was flagged other was on one board. So, I mean, if you can find a common denominator.
- [55:59]
Tony Hill
Yeah, it's great.
- [56:00]
Carly Campbell
I'll be interested, you know, as more people start using the flagpin stool, about the insights that we can gain just from hearing from people who are using it. I've been waiting for a tool like this for two years now, because I first started exploring the link flags two years ago, and I had to manually open every pin and read the code on the back of every single pin because I don't have a tool and I can't code. Uh, so it's really hard to get anywhere with it. So I'm just really excited to see what we can learn that way.
- [56:30]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So, like I said, I'm not necessarily recommending that you delete your flagged pens. I'm deleting all of mine. I'm taking notes of anything that has that sensitive text on there, honestly, because I'm not in niches where most pens would be labeled that way. I'm just going to start avoiding these topics.
- [56:50]
Carly Campbell
Well, I can tell you with certainty the word kiss, the word anxiety, the word discipline. Diet will almost always get you a sensitive raw pin text. So there are words. And if you read the community guidelines, you will get a feeling for what these words are, and you can often make the connection in your mind.
- [57:15]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that makes sense. So the more you look at this stuff, the more you'll better understand what you need to do. Yeah. So utilize that tool as best you can. So, anything else with these individual pins or do you want to move to the keyword level bans?
- [57:31]
Carly Campbell
Well, the keyword level ban is essentially like, it'll show up like on an individual pin. Right. Like, I think this is what I'm talking about, like the word kiss, the word doubt, the word anxiety, these things that might show up as these sensitive raw pin text, they will be words that Pinterest has chosen to suppress the distribution on. And it doesn't really have anything to do with your account necessarily at all. But if by accident you have followed, I mean, I don't know, I would be interested to know. What if you had a URL, a domain? What if your domain had the word diet or kiss or anxiety in it? And now every single thing you've ever pinned to Pinterest is going out there with that word. That's. I don't know.
- [58:25]
Tony Hill
Right. So you should not start a website called like kiss your diet anxietygoodbye. Com.
- [58:30]
Carly Campbell
I wouldn't start that website. Yeah, but if you do, like, the problem might not be you and it might not be what you're doing on Pinterest. It might be a keyword level limitation that is built into the platform.
- [58:47]
Tony Hill
Oh, you know, one thing that we noticed from creating this tool is that it takes like up to, we saw maybe on average about 90 days for a pin to get flagged.
- [58:59]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [59:00]
Tony Hill
Oh, that. It's like they have this system, that automated system. It's probably constantly running, but it can take up to 90 days for it to analyze your pen to determine if, if it's flagged or not. And so if all of a sudden they get to your account or to a group of pins or to a board, and all of a sudden they immediately flag all these things.
- [59:15]
Carly Campbell
Well, that could account for a sudden drop that we can't account for elsewhere. I think it probably could. I don't know what kind of. Well, actually, even the sensitive raw pin text ones we know, they can still rank, but we don't know what their distribution is like. And so if you've been getting out there in the feeds for the first three months and then you're, you know, you're limited this way, then it would feel like a shadow ban. But that's one of those things where I'm talking about like a keyword level ban. You could put on that account other pins focusing on other words and potentially see them get more Distribution, because you'll be able to get into the feed with other words, whereas you couldn't with the words you were using. That wouldn't be surprising.
- [60:08]
Tony Hill
And then who knows on how Pinterest evolves their algorithm that decides what to label these and the status codes for each of these pins. And so that may change and evolve over time and we won't know until it starts to happen. And probably another reason just to continue to use that free tool. I'd love to eventually get that baked into pin clicks.
- [60:31]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, that'd be really cool. I would like that.
- [60:32]
Tony Hill
So you can do that with your account or anyone else's account, I mean, and look and see what kind of flagged pens they may have.
- [60:38]
Carly Campbell
I have been doing it with lots of other accounts and I mean, so far for me it is just like making so many questions in my mind. Like, you know, because you see some that have such high instances of flags versus some that, that you would expect to have more flags. But by looking for patterns, that's how we're going to learn whatever it is we're going to learn.
- [61:02]
Tony Hill
That's right. Now, what about at the domain level? A domain ban.
- [61:07]
Carly Campbell
So there are times when you'll click on a PIN on Pinterest and you'll get a little pop up that'll say, oops, we've blocked that content and that's a domain level ban. Like nobody's getting through to that domain, no matter who pinned it. It doesn't matter if it was account that was banned or if it's pinned on a perfectly healthy account. Nobody's getting through there. And I think that if you get your domain banned on Pinterest, you need to give up and go home. I don't know anybody who's gotten it unbanned, do you?
- [61:39]
Tony Hill
Yeah, I know really well. Yeah, I've got mine.
- [61:42]
Carly Campbell
Wait, but without getting your account banned?
- [61:45]
Tony Hill
Yeah, it was just a domain level. I've had it happen twice on one account.
- [61:49]
Carly Campbell
But your account was still active. The account was still active and the domain was banned.
- [61:54]
Tony Hill
The domain was banned. Yeah. I only noticed because I logged in on the analytics one morning and saw all my Pinterest traffic drop overnight. I was like, what is going on?
- [62:04]
Carly Campbell
Yes, that happened when my account was banned too. But that went like, it went hand in hand with like the account ban.
- [62:09]
Tony Hill
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [62:11]
Carly Campbell
Oh, yeah. And so your account wasn't banned.
- [62:14]
Tony Hill
No.
- [62:14]
Carly Campbell
But your domain was.
- [62:15]
Tony Hill
That's right.
- [62:16]
Carly Campbell
But your account wasn't cleaned at the time?
- [62:19]
Tony Hill
Well, no, it was because Most recent time it happened in 2023 was the most recent one.
- [62:24]
Carly Campbell
I feel like you must have told me this before and I must not have captured this part of the information.
- [62:29]
Tony Hill
I've talked about it in the Fat Sax forums.
- [62:31]
Carly Campbell
So what did you do to get it better fixed?
- [62:33]
Tony Hill
I just sent him a message.
- [62:35]
Carly Campbell
Okay.
- [62:36]
Tony Hill
Yeah, when you log in, you go to like look for support or contact Pinterest. Like it. And it walked me through this whole process of choosing the right things to connect it to the right support person. And then I sent an email and then I also finally responded to all the emails that I get from people who are work for Pinterest sales. Yeah, I finally responded to one who has been like emailing me once a week and scheduled a call. So I can just like let her know, hey, uh, FYI, my domain is banned. See if you can do anything about that. That's when I learned that their sales team, at least at that time, really were not part of Pinterest. They were just a third party contracted subcontracted company and really didn't have a lot of clout, even though they had a Pinterest domain email address. But yeah, I was able to get it back within I think 48 hours or so.
- [63:26]
Carly Campbell
Oh, that's fantastic. I guess it's worth emailing. But truly like the same false flags that would trip any other ban could be applied to a domain level ban also.
- [63:37]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [63:38]
Carly Campbell
So if your domain is legitimately not spammy, you could hope to get it back. But if it is spammy, then I wouldn't.
- [63:45]
Tony Hill
Yep. Yeah, yeah, they, they told me it was just a false. A false positive.
- [63:50]
Carly Campbell
Right. I had no idea you could still log into your account when that happened. That is fascinating.
- [63:55]
Tony Hill
Yeah, I was able to do it. Actually, I did it from the app on my phone because I was like out of town or something. Wow, it was really stressful to lose all that traffic overnight.
- [64:07]
Carly Campbell
Oh yeah. Yeah, it would be.
- [64:10]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So I don't know, maybe because. Yeah, I don't know why. So that was an interesting case. So there's hope there if you get banned at the domain level. Yeah, I don't know. It wouldn't hurt to respond to those salespeople every once in a while. Develop a relationship.
- [64:25]
Carly Campbell
Right. I have. Anecdotally, I have heard a plenty of people who have had a shadow ban or felt like they had a shadow ban on their account and ran, you know, two to $10 a day in ads and seen things pick up and turn around. And I have too. You have too yeah.
- [64:44]
Tony Hill
But then just recently, someone had their account. I don't know if it was shadow band or band and they were running ads. It could have been both cases. There were a couple people that mentioned it to me and they were. They were running ads and just.
- [64:58]
Carly Campbell
And it was picking up and no.
- [65:00]
Tony Hill
Then it didn't matter at the end of the day. At the end of the day, it.
- [65:02]
Carly Campbell
Didn'T matter at the end of the day.
- [65:03]
Tony Hill
Yeah. I just wonder if there's like a certain threshold of, like, if you spend maybe a thousand dollars a month, then maybe their systems will account for that.
- [65:13]
Carly Campbell
I'm sure, I'm sure there must be. I've heard people having success with it with a small spend, you know, a couple dollars here and there.
- [65:22]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [65:23]
Carly Campbell
I don't believe I've also heard of people say that, like, oh, if you, you know, if you run ads to this pin and then you turn ads off to this pin, it'll be suppressed or be banned. Like, not banned, but, you know, like limited distribution. I've never seen any evidence for that. I've had last year for Christmas. Not this year for Christmas. I didn't do it this year because it didn't seem worth it. But last year for Christmas, I ran ads to a handful of my Christmas pins to try to like front load them with engagement. And I did not run the ads again this year and they still got great engagement this year. So they were not like limited in distribution just because I chose not to pay for them again.
- [66:03]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe it really just doesn't do anything.
- [66:06]
Carly Campbell
Maybe not. It's possible.
- [66:08]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Who knows? Well, I think that about covers it. Gosh, we're over an hour here on talking about bans, but I recognize it can be a stressful situation, like if you are currently in the middle of dealing with a shadow ban or an account ban or domain level, all that kind of stuff. I recognize it's challenging and it can be hard to sometimes just walk away from an account and start a new one. Fortunately, your website's still around, your content is still there. But as hopefully you've learned through this conversation that the content could also be the problem. Right. It could be the words that you're using and your pins and your URLs, that kind of stuff, or even your domain name on that level. So it could be something to do with your pins, your strategy, or it's just bad luck you got caught up in a, you know, just a bad. A situation where the automated system got it wrong. Either way. If you have got any questions about this, feel free to reach out to one of us in our communities and we'll be happy to answer you there. Until then, we will catch you on the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pentalk. Head over to pentalkpodcast.com to get the show notes and the resources mentioned. And hey, if you like this episode and want to hear more from us, please rate and review our show. Thanks.