How can we get follow links from Pinterest and Instagram

[rakesh1]

While using Open Site Explorer from Moz I came across follow links from Instagram and Pinterest.

Now my question is how can we get follow links from Pinterest and Instagram

[rakesh1]

Hi Paddy,

Agree on the spam part. Though Pinterest used to have followed links initially. I checked that for one of the company using Moz Open Site Explorer. However it doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

All the links now have become no follow.

Will research a bit more on this and will keep you posted.

Thanks for the help.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Anup,

The standard way to get links from social websites such as Pinterest and Instagram is via a profile page. For example, here is the Adidas Football page on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/adidasfootball/

As you'll see, there is a link in the bio which, at the time of writing, goes to a YouTube video. But if you look at the source code of the page, this link is tagged with rel="nofollow me". The nofollow part tells Google and other search engines that this link isn't trusted and therefore shouldn't pass PageRank. You can read more on nofollow here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

The "me" part tells Google that the target of the link is directly associated to you. In the Adidas example, they link from their own Instagram page to their own YouTube channel. So this indicates to the search engines that the pages are linked together which can help them figure out which pages are the official ones of Adidas. You can read more about rel="me" here:

http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/index-inclusion/google-rel-me/

On the Adidas Pinterest page here:

https://www.pinterest.com/adidas/

You can see a link to Adidas.com. Again, if you look at the source code, you'll see that this link is tagged with rel="nofollow".

So overall, you can't really get followed links from these platforms because if you could, they'd open themselves up to spam where people would create thousands of fake profiles just to get links.

I hope that helps.

Paddy