You're right. We checked the thing in detail and in fact there are a lot of collateral follow links created from certain viral pins.

No mystery after all!

Hello Dmitrii,

I will agree with you but the case with this website is raising to us a couple of more serious questions which I did not mention. This website was severely hit by penguin 1. It lost many positions, many #1 positions and throw it to ranking to page #2 or #3. However due to the mid to low importance for the certain website by the owner no actions were taken toward regaining the positions or refreshing the link profile.

So the only difference between the 2012 link profile which led to the penguin punishment and the 2017 link profile which led to recovery, not a full one though, is those 500K+ pinterest links. To be honest we haven't made any thorough research on the case of collateral link gaining caused by pinterest but in general terms no further links were added.

This is what is making us having second thoughts about the actual value of the social media links.

Hello,

First of all I know that all the links which come from Pinterest are no follow.

However about 4 years ago we made a campaign to pinterest for one of the websites we are managing. Although the thing was going well we had to stop it for various reasons.

Right now, 4 years later, this thing has grown big without any move for us! All these years our pins, which were great in many aspects, were continuously reppined. This has lead to the point where the Google Search Console is reporting that about 500.000 links are linking to our website from Pinterest.

We know how this has helped us or not concerning the actual refferring traffic from Pinterest but our main question, and this where we want the Moz's community help, is how is this helping from a SEO aspect.

Thank you!

Hi Dirk,

Thank you very much for your answer!

Hi,

I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example:

This is a page of a hotel in booking.com:

http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html

When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg

My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?