Clickable URLs Have Changed in Pinterest's Pin Descriptions

UPDATE: Please note that Pinterest seems to have fixed the issue of clickable links. Before if you put a specific link in the description it would go to the source of the pin. This seemed to be happening for about 4 days before March 20th. Since this went on for so long, I believed that this was a permanent change, however this is no longer the case, the url that is written in the description will direct to that url. What is in this blog post is not applicable (at least for now). This was brought to my attention by Krishna De so please kindly disregard the rest of the article, unless you would like to read it for fun. Big thanks goes to Krishna for letting me know.

I first heard about this when one of the members of the members on the Google Plus Pinterest Marketing Community had asked the question regarding links in descriptions no longer leading the to the url that was typed in, so I decided to explore.

I’m going to say this right away, this is one of those blog posts that it’s just so much easier to explain through a video. So if you have three and half minutes to watch, then check out the video. If you’re at work, or reading this on bus then read on.

Spammers…YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

I don’t know about you, but it sure annoys me when I’ve worked hard at creating a pin, only to have some stupid bot (a type of software that automates) take my pin, change the descriptions and then add in their own website. I’ve seen it happen with my own pins dozens of times.

I want to tell people “Don’t click on the pin in the pin description! That’s not my site!” in the comments, but I just don’t have time to do that.

Well it seems like the good people at Pinterest have decided that enough is enough. They don’t want those nasty spammers to do that. And so those Pinterest engineers did something which I personally love. They make any url that’s in the pin descriptions clickable but it leads back to the source of the pin.

By the way, this is only for the desktop version of Pinterest since urls in descriptions are not clickable on mobile.

URLs in Descriptions All Redirect To the Source of the Pin

To prevent those bad shenanigans from spammers ever happening again, Pinterest has decided that ALL (actually there’s one exception that I’ll go into later) urls that are in descriptions will now redirect to the source of the pin.

Here’s what I mean by the source. Login to Pinterest on the desktop version, and then head on over to “Your Profile and Pins.” Now go and visit any board, and then hover your mouse on any pin that’s in the board’s collections. You should see something like a pencil popup, just like the one below of a pin I repinned from Melissa Taylor’s article about 8 types of Pinterest descriptions.

Once you click on the pencil icon, then what happens is a screen will pop up and you’ll see the source box that’s at the bottom. You can’t see the full url, but the url is for an article about Linkedin’s publishing platform on Social Mouths.

That means from now on all URL’s or websites typed in a pin description will all go to the source of that pin.

So if the source of my pin leads back to this url address:
http://www.mcngmarketing.com/social-media-plan-how-to-create-one-in-9-steps
but if I put in the description the url SocialMouths.com, when I click on that link, it will automatically redirect me back to the MCNG Marketing blog post.

What Does that Mean for Your Pinterest Marketing?

To me, I think this is amazing news, and here’s why. Before we needed to add the full links of a blog post or an e-commerce product in order for it to properly redirect to the source site. But now we can just put our own main website, and it will automatically get directed to the page that the pin is linked to.

No more long and ugly urls have to live in our Pin descriptions when people view them on mobile. And since they aren’t clickable on mobile, we might as well keep the urls as short as possible. I know for me, I’ll now be putting my main website, MCNGMarketing.com into every description.

The boldness of the url in pin descriptions in the main url will help it grab more attention.

Clickable URLs in Comments Go to the Source URL

I tell you, Pinterest thought of everything. I thought I could outsmart the system by putting in a customized url in the comments and have them redirect to the site I want.

Nope, that won’t work either. Any time you leave a url in a comment on any pin, that url will ALSO be redirected to the source link.

Score one for Pinterest users, and zero for those dreaded spammers who do auto commenting.

This Applies to All Links

This is pretty much a site wide change. This means that all your previous links that you’ve put in your descriptions will be affected.

There’s One Exception to the Rule

Based on what I can see there is ONLY one exception to the rule, and that is if you put in a url that involves Pinterest then it will redirect to that site. So if in your pin’s description you decide that you want share a url that’s from Pinterest, then that works out great.

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