What got you banned on Pinterest?

Hi everyone, just to make things clear, I'm not talking about obvious ban reasons like posting adult content, posting the same pin like crazy or stolen pics with unrelated URLs. I'm trying to make sense of those ban reasons which are not obvious to the naked eye.

I'll use my own story as an example. My 1+ year old business account (health niche) got banned this fall and from the conversations I had with Pinterest support I learned it had something to do with posting spammy pins on group boards. I never posted anything spammy (pins came from lots of mainstream health sites and I always manually checked repins), pinning frequency was low compared to a heavy pinner (about 20-30 pins per day) and I never pinned more than one pin/day in the same group board.

However, I made the rookie mistake of using Buffer to schedule pins on group boards (which to be honest was a really stupid idea) and I'm 90% sure that's what got the account banned. The only two possible reasons for the ban (I thought a lot about this) are 1) I posted the same pin right after another pinner (maybe in multiple instances because they were scheduled pins) and got reported or 2) a Buffer glitch posted the same pin on the same board consecutively (this happened to someone I know but it wasn't on a group board so there was time to delete the duplicate before anything bad could happen - Pinterest is more strict with group boards anyway).

I learned from my mistake and started from scratch but can't help to think someday I may do something I consider benign and wake up with my account disabled. What ridiculous ways did you managed to get banned on Pinterest?

I got flagged for using edited images with some spam message (click here) despite the image being related to niche and group. Now I try not to invite people to click on pin and everything is ok. Make attracting pin, with size 600x900 or similar to proportion 2:3.

I can only suspect you got reported, which is probably what happened to me as well. Oh and btw, the max res for Pinterest pics is 735x1102 px. Hope this helps.

I "changed" the URL in a couple of popular pins (i.e. 300+ repins). By "changed", I was just trying to clean it up. The Addthis plugin concatenates numbers after URLs for tracking. I was hoping to remove them. Then I got banned. 2 domains in the same day. That was close to year-end 2015, so I missed out on much of the holiday traffic.

They are becoming very hard to deal with lately,with so many bans users will be getting tired of finding thier favourite sites constantly being banned.

I got my account blocked once because of the re-pins. Not sure exactly why but they said something about spammy pins. After sending them a mail, they said it was a mistake and unbanned my account

They are really getting so bad. I watched part of a 30 minutes video by pinterest anti spam team. Watch it and prepare to be really depressed by how sophisticated they are getting.

Are people still able to use pinterest with bots without getting banned? Because they seem to have a one strike and out policy for me and once one of mine gets hit they all are destroyed.

I spent last two months perfecting a my bot and so it really winded me to see this happen. I am not sure whehter to carry on or accept defeat. Because it sucks to bad to put all that effort in and then have it washed away.

One of my pins went viral and got some nice traffic, the next day the account was banned.

Contacted Pinterest and they said they won't recover

Contacted again asking why and received the same automated message.

Contacted the third time after about a week and finally someone took a look and said sorry for the issue and re-enabled my account.

5 years old account of a whitehat site with no spam intentions whatsoever.

Weird.

thetraveller said:

One of my pins went viral and got some nice traffic, the next day the account was banned.

Contacted Pinterest and they said they won't recover

Contacted again asking why and received the same automated message.

Contacted the third time after about a week and finally someone took a look and said sorry for the issue and re-enabled my account.

5 years old account of a whitehat site with no spam intentions whatsoever.

Weird.

Click to expand...

Wow. interesting to see even innocents getting caught in the crossfire.

It's pretty common for accounts to get banned by mistake on Pinterest. Some of their anti-spam filters are too tight and in the case of the pin that went viral I suspect it may have been reported by a few people (if the domain it was pointing to was ok), and I'm pretty sure that triggers an auto-ban. And yeah, Pinterest's support team is way to small for the size of their network, it's very obvious from how difficult it is to actually get a real conversation with one of them.

This one won't get you banned, but LinkedIn can remove the content and close your group or page. Additionally, LinkedIn will terminate the accounts of users who have been "deemed to be repeat infringers under the United States Copyright Act." You know who you are.