Pinterest pins with broken or dead links are incredibly annoying. When you are browsing all of the beautiful, helpful pins on Pinterest, there is nothing worse than clicking to go to the website for more information — and it just isn’t there. Perhaps the blog has moved to a new website, or the post has been renamed, but the content has certainly gone missing for some reason.
Expert Pinterest marketers tell us that having pins with broken links will make a pinner look sloppy and unprofessional. For your own personal use, if you someday decide to do that craft, or make that recipe, or buy that product that you pinned, you’ll be disappointed to click through and see nothing but an error message. Causing our followers this kind of frustration is not what any blogger, business owner or individual wants to do! And if it’s your own website’s pins that have broken links, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic!
Though Pinterest may occasionally correct your link if it’s an image and website they are familiar with, there are still a lot of broken links out there on millions of boards. And in trying to help, Pinterest may guess wrong and add another incorrect link, as they acknowledge on their Help page.
I’m actually quite careful about what I pin, and almost always click through the link to verify it before pinning. But when I used Pin4Ever to check for broken links on my personal boards, I found several dozen! It shows that even careful pinners are sure to have some bad links on their pins.
In order to clear your account of those annoying pins with broken links, your first step should be to identify them with Pin4Ever’s new Find Broken Links tool. When you run a backup, after selecting your boards, simply check the box at the very bottom of the pop-up which says, “Check for Broken Links.” After running the backup, click the Broken Links icon on the Pin4Ever toolbar. A page will come up, displaying the pins our program has located which have bad links.
While Pin4Ever can’t find every inaccurate link, it can help you find many of them. For example, if someone pinned the main page of a blog instead of the exact article, this won’t show up as a broken link, since there is actually content there. Many times, though, the link problem will be caused by a 404 “Page not found” error, or because the content has been transferred to a different website, and Pin4Ever will show you these pins. If you want to verify that the link is no good, and see the type of error, you can click “View Original Source” under the pin image on your Broken Links page.
Once you have identified a broken link through Pin4Ever, you will want to correct the broken link by finding the true source. First, click the link under the image which says “View on Pinterest.” The pin on the Pinterest website will open in a new tab. At this point, I like to resize my window to about half the width of the screen, so it is on the left side. Then I click the Firefox icon to open a new window, which will also be half-size, and then drag this new window to sit side-by-side to the right of the original window. In the new window, I go to Google Images. Then, I left click the original pin image and, holding down the left mouse button, I drag the image to the new window, and drop it in Google Image’s search box.
Google Image will then list a bunch of websites which have that image. In looking for the original, the best source will have the largest sized image, will usually be an original website (rather than Pinterest or Facebook), and will have the earliest date. When you see a promising source, click through to the website and see if it seems original, or if it gives a link to the actual source. When you have found the original source, copy the link, and then click Edit on your Pinterest pin, and add that link for the source of the pin.
If you would rather see similar instructions for finding accurate links with some pictures to help, please see Cleaning Up Your Pinterest Boards.
If you haven’t tried Pin4Ever’s backups and other helpful Pinterest tools yet, you can take advantage of our one week free trial by clicking the green Install now button on our website’s main page. After your free trial, you can buy any plan (Basic plans start at $4.99/month, Premium plan is $49.99/year) to continue running backups, which now includes our helpful “Find Broken Links” feature.
