There are hundreds of different ways to do SEO, including sitemaps, link-building, search-engine-friendly site design and so on. The best strategy for successful SEO can differ by product, by page and even by season. Identifying what works best for each case helps us move fast with limited resources. By running a large number of experiments, we found some well-known strategies for SEO didn’t work for us, while certain tactics we weren’t confident about worked like a charm.
For example, we once noticed that Google Webmaster Tool detected too many duplicate title tags on our board pages. The title tags on board pages were set to be “{board_name} on Pinterest,” and there are many boards created by different users with the same names. The page title tag is known to be an important factor for SEO, so we wondered if keeping the title tags unique would increase traffic. We ran an experiment to reduce duplicate title tags by including Pin counts in the title tag, for instance “{board_name} on Pinterest | ({number} Pins).” But we found that there was no statistically significant change in traffic between the groups.
So, what worked well on Pinterest? Pinterest is filled with tens of billions of Pins, but the text descriptions can be lacking. We assumed that providing better text on our pages would solve this problem, so we started with a relatively simple approach to improve the text descriptions. Pins are added by many different users, and some are more descriptive than others. For many Pins, we picked a better description from other Pins that contained the same image and showed it in addition to the existing description. The experiment results were much better than we expected (remember Figure 3?) which motivated us to invest more in text descriptions using sophisticated technologies, such as visual analysis. A series of follow up experiments resulted in a nearly 30 percent increase in traffic last year.