Pinterest

[jwdl]

This is a bit of a rant, to be fair, but I'd appreiciate peoples opinions all the same...

If you search google in the US for long hairstyles at around position 4 and 5 there are a couple of pinterest pages that are just doorway pages for the sites they link (or mostly link) to.

The first one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/ is said to have 6k pinterest followers, I can't fathom why a doorway page to such a low pagerank site would get that many but it doesn't look like they've bought them.

And the second one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesvane/long-prom-hairstyles/ is so blatent. 20 or so pictures all from the same site.

Google seems intent on penalising "wrong doers" while everyone else gets caught in the crossfire and yet someone throws a pinterest doorway page together in 1/2 an hour and it gets near the top for a relatively large search term.

Panda/penguin etc were sold to us as a fix for low quality and spam but instead it seems to have given a free meal ticket to people like this and yet established sites get kicked in the teeth by arbitrary penalties and negative seo.

[Debe]

Pinterest is ranking higher and higher in THE social media outlet on which to post links to our sites.  As JDP said, there's nothing stopping you from featuring photos from your website on your Pinterest page and get those same followers--the good news for you, if your content is good, you'll land the consumer.

[JDP]

When I Google long hairstyles I only get http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/  in the third position.  I've noticed recently a very similar pattern with etsy.com stores.  They are ranking #1 for several very competitive terms on pretty weak external link profiles.  To me it just looks like a few external links to a deep page on a high authority root domain combined with a good title tag and a lot of internal linking.   I'd say nobody is keeping you from playing the same game.