Where I’m Speaking

Here is an updated calendar of my speaking engagements

Event Information:

  • Pinterest Has a Pinteresting SEO Problem

    For the inaugural post on my new blog I thought I'd report a technical SEO issue I discovered on one of the biggest, booming social networks. Today I found an SEO error in a place I did not expect to find it, on Pinterest. The darling of visual social media at the moment, Pinterest has been making big strides since it burst onto the social media scene last year.

    I'm not the most active user on Pinterest and only have a little over a hundred followers for my boards. I use the site mostly when I'm testing something or to upload visual marketing pieces like QR Codes or Small Business Vehicles. Today was a day I had set aside to go through and delete all of my cell phone images to free up space on my sd card. That meant I had to login upload all of these photos I had taken during the year for my Pinterest boards. In doing so I decided I hated the name of my QR code board "QR Code Examples" It felt just kind of meh, so I changed it. That's when the problem became glaringly obvious.

    Pinterest uses the board title for the SEO friendly URL slugs, much like Wordpress does for a blog post or a page. However, when you change the title from the original it updates the URL and does not redirect the old URL to the newly created one. I don't know how often people change the title of their board after establishing it, but if it happens even semi-frequently it could be costing Pinterest a lot of link juice and a bad user experience for those following links to Pinterest boards that are now a 404.

    you can see the original board name and url.
    you can see the original board name and url.

    now the new board name is put in
    now the new board name is put in

    it now creates a new url for the board.
    it now creates a new url for the board based on the new board name.

    pinterest soft-404 page
    the old URL no longer works, this page is not a 404 error either. So while Pinterest gets link juice, they could effectively have a lot of copies of this page indexed in search engines

Joe Youngblood is an SEO, Digital Marketer, Researcher, Writer, Futurologist, and Entrepreneur focusing on the near and distant future of consumer experiences with the digital based world. He has built several businesses online including a streaming radio station, a streaming gaming video web host, and dozens of blogs. He speaks at colleges, conferences, and meetup groups around the country and has been interviewed on several podcasts and cited in numerous publications. His 5-star rated speaking style is engaging, inspirational, and informative keeping students, weary business people, and executives hanging on until the very end. When he’s not running his own agency, saving businesses from digital marketing fails, predicting the future of technology, and blogging he works on his own Sci-Fi stories and spends time with his 2 dogs.

This is a list of events he’s currently schedule to speak at, to see his past engagements click on the year and a full list will appear. You can read reviews of his speaking here: Futurologist & Marketing Speaker Reviews – Joe Youngblood