Pinterest likely cloaks traffic. Internal site traffic to a pinboard will require a log-in/register to continue viewing the board. Traffic from the Google index is allowed to continue viewing the board. That is treating search engines differently than human users (unless they throw up this log-in wall for crawling Googlebots too, which would severely hamper crawl-ability of the site).
You do not change the page titles of a site so you can get a few more visitors from Google's algorithm, you change the page titles of a site, because they are ambiguous for all your users. If you want to create more unique page titles you can credit the username that created the board to the pagetitle, instead of a meaningless and everchanging "number of pins on this board". For example "Mickey Mouse on Pinterest by John Doe" or "Mickey Mouse | John Doe | Pinterest".
You run A/B tests to test if user engagement with the site increases. If you run A/B tests to test if certain changes increase your search engine rankings/Google visitors then you are reverse engineering Google. Especially with a large site like Pinterest this may gain you some ill-gotten benefit over sites that do play nice:
"If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly." [1]
Even on a site like Pinterest I see low-hanging on-page SEO stuff that could be implemented better. For instance the header for a pinboard starts at line 788. Proper content stacking/HTML code ordering ensures that information retrieval bots do not have to wade through many menu's of boiletplate text, before they get to the unique meat of the page.
There is basically one single way to do legit SEO and most of the tips and techniques for that are transparently written in the Google Webmaster Guidelines [3]. The good news is that this has not changed much at all over the years, so one can stop algo chasing, and start improving the site for all users and all search engines.
BTW: The blog has no canonical tag [2] and puts the _entire_ article inside the contents of '<meta name="twitter:description"'.
Comments
Pinterest likely cloaks traffic. Internal site traffic to a pinboard will require a log-in/register to continue viewing the board. Traffic from the Google index is allowed to continue viewing the board. That is treating search engines differently than human users (unless they throw up this log-in wall for crawling Googlebots too, which would severely hamper crawl-ability of the site).
You do not change the page titles of a site so you can get a few more visitors from Google's algorithm, you change the page titles of a site, because they are ambiguous for all your users. If you want to create more unique page titles you can credit the username that created the board to the pagetitle, instead of a meaningless and everchanging "number of pins on this board". For example "Mickey Mouse on Pinterest by John Doe" or "Mickey Mouse | John Doe | Pinterest".
You run A/B tests to test if user engagement with the site increases. If you run A/B tests to test if certain changes increase your search engine rankings/Google visitors then you are reverse engineering Google. Especially with a large site like Pinterest this may gain you some ill-gotten benefit over sites that do play nice:
"If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly." [1]
Even on a site like Pinterest I see low-hanging on-page SEO stuff that could be implemented better. For instance the header for a pinboard starts at line 788. Proper content stacking/HTML code ordering ensures that information retrieval bots do not have to wade through many menu's of boiletplate text, before they get to the unique meat of the page.
There is basically one single way to do legit SEO and most of the tips and techniques for that are transparently written in the Google Webmaster Guidelines [3]. The good news is that this has not changed much at all over the years, so one can stop algo chasing, and start improving the site for all users and all search engines.
BTW: The blog has no canonical tag [2] and puts the _entire_ article inside the contents of '<meta name="twitter:description"'.
[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2012/08/website-te...
[2] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2009/02/specify-yo...
[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en "Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site."