Is It Just Me? Or Is Pinterest Hiding Boudoir Photos?
I'm hardly an expert Pinterest poster, but something is (has been) up in the Pinterest universe.
In the world of photography there's so much to keep up with, and only so many hours in a day... or week. Over the past few years I would try to post a few photos everyone once in a while to my Pinterest account, just to stay active on the social scene. I was hardly a professional Pinterest-er, but I would upload photos a few times a month.
As a result, I would get some traffic to my website from my account. It was nothing earth shattering, but I have have been receiving maybe 9,000 or so visits a year from my pins. It was OK traffic to get, but in my case Pinterest visitors are merely that...just traffic. They are not my local clients or buyers, just curious travelers looking at my galleries.
That being said, any traffic is good traffic. So, as I would remember, I kept posting a few pins here and there, and the visitors would keep coming. It was fair deal.
Then, I noticed about March or April 2018 everything came to a halt. Suddenly. My Pinterest traffic literally fell to zero. Not only that, I saw from my Pinterest analytics, my impressions on my pins, had also, literally fallen to zero. I'm not exactly certain of those numbers pre-change, and as it seems at least of the time of writing this, Pinterest doesn't let you go back that far to review their analytics (which is weird) but I'm sure it was in the tens of thousands of impressions per month.
I remember at the time back in April 2018 I did a bit of checking on this, because the change was noticeable. I think I did a few searches to see if Pinterest had changed their algorithm, but other than spending a few minutes on the subject, I didn't really pursue it.
...So my Pinterest account was dead, suddenly, and pretty much has been for over a year. I'm a busy guy! Finally, in late June I had a few spare minutes and decided to take a look at my Pinterest account. Let's take a look:
Hmm, not so great, huh. Three whole link clicks over the course of the month. Now granted, my account had pretty much been abandoned over the past year, but that's a far cry from my average clicks and impressions from just a bit over a year earlier.
My first thought was... I wonder what happened? My second thought... Was it possible to get any of that traffic back?
I started to do some poking around to see what was going on. I did some searches for boudoir photos, and I started to notice something strange... there essentially weren't any.
I did a search for "Boudoir Photos" and saw some interesting results... not really any boudoir photos. Yeah, there's a pin for a blog article or two, but upon further look, there really weren't any actual boudoir photos displaying in the results. The first photo has some sexy wedding photo ideas, but the rest were pins about Save The Date cards, camera hacks, and basically a bunch not so relevant results. ...Not to many boudoir related results. Strange.
So, I tried some other searches. What about a search for "boudoir booty poses?" That's a fairy specific search term...
Do we see any actual "boudoir booty poses" in there? Hmmm... possibly one, and as I scroll down none of the other photos are even slightly related to the search term.
I think something is going on here! I don't want to turn this post into a series of screen shots for search terms, but other common boudoir search items yielded similar results. NOW, I know I've been off Pinterest for nearly a year, but boudoir photos were a-plenty on Pinterest...and now, not so much.
Did Pinterest start hiding boudoir photos? Is that what happened last year when my link clicks and impressions suddenly vanished? I know that Pinterest changes their algorithm from time to time, and there would really be no way to know if this is exactly what happened, or if there was some other situation that occurred.
I guess I'd have to take a poll of other boudoir photographers on Pinterest to see if a similar situation occurred to them, as well.
Is it possible to get any of this traffic back?
Well, that is uncertain at this point. I have started posting and re-pinning photos on Pinterest again, wit