February 21, 2012

How to Block Your Website from Pinning on Pinterest


Are you on Pinterest? It's an innovative social platform to discover or organize interesting stuff found online and to share with other people. And it becomes more and more popular with aggressive user engagement since it has been open for people via invitations. You can find a brief introduction about Pinterest here in Add Pinterest Pin It Button for Your Blogger Posts post. Pinterest is all about sharing and managing interesting stuff found online. You can promote your content if you need. But mostly it works for having interesting pins. Either you can pin interesting images or videos found online or upload content right from your computer. But still some publishers may see some sort of a copyright violation over there as Pinterest enables ease of access to copyrighted materials that are being pinned from their websites by other users. So Pinterest offered publishers a way to opt-out their websites from being pinned on Pinterest. Do you wanna opt-out from being pinned?

Most of people start to use Pinterest as it is a new way of social experience. But as it gets popular, people start to use it without even understanding the site. However from first days, Pinterest imposed few guidelines and asks users to credit sources when they pin external content to their personal pinboards. Eventhough they have been not credited, pins will always attached with link back to source page. So it still advantageous as a way of gaining more traffic to websites. But if you are much concerned about copyright infringement of your content, Pinterest offer nopin meta tag for you to prevent content being pinned from your website. Actually this meta tag prevents Pinterest from crawling images on sites. But as an alternative, still people can download copyrighted content from your website and upload to their pinboards without acknowledging you.


Steps:

There is no such a complex procedure to opt out your site from pinning. Just search for <head> tag in your template and add below meta tag right after the <head> tag in a new line.

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

Note: If you are a Blogger user and don't know how to edit your template, read How to Edit Your Blogger Template.


More Information:

* Once you opt out your site from pinning, whenever a user try to pin your images or content, they will be notified that your site doesn't allow pins.

If someone try to pin your site content from Pinterest


If someone try to pin directly from your website via bookmarklet or pin it button



Enjoy :-)

2 comments:

Harleena Singh said...

Informative post once again Mayura!

I have often wondered as to how and why certain sites don't allow us to Pin their content, and now I know how and why they do it. :)

However, I always thought that pinning the content always made the content go viral and helped spread a word. And if someone wants to copy your image or content, they can do it without pinning your content too - isn't it? (just as you had mentioned in an earlier post and how you can use Tynt etc for stopping it - I remember that!)

Nevertheless, this seems like a good way for those who don't want their content to be shared, but I don't think I would go in for it. :)

Thanks for sharing and it's nice to learn about such things at your blog. :)

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Harleena,

Well... Well... Well... Now you know what's behind it, no? :)

Pinterest had to go through massive complaints about image copyrights. I agree with you about spreading the word. It helps a lot to bring more traffic to sites but there are some websites doesn't want anyone to save their images somewhere else, such as projects, plans etc. They block copying and saving on their sites, but still Pinterest crawl and allows pinning.

But I think they better not post them online publicly if they don't wanna share with others. You are correct dear :) Any image posted online can be saved though we use tricks on 'em. However it's their perspective and they will find this helpful. However Tynt allows us to track copied images but doesn't prevent copying dear. In that case, disabling right click would be better for images :)

Further I think if you have personal images published on a page such as About page, it would helpful too. But depends on the situation ;)

Thanks for commenting and really appreciate sharing your views dear :) You're an enthusiastic reader who remember all stuff as you read 'em yesterday.

Cheers...

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