In this post I am going to explain what happened when I somehow managed to get my Pinterest account suspended for spam. I’ll outline:
- The circumstances around my suspension.
- How I found out my account was suspended.
- How I managed to get my account reactivated within 10 hours.
It’s not a pleasant experience, but you can learn from what happened to me and follow the steps I took if Pinterest suspends your account for spam too.
Of course… this assumes you haven’t actually knowingly spammed Pinterest!
Table of Contents
- The Background to my Pinterest Account Being Suspended
- The SideGains Pinterest Account History
- My Account Suspension
- What to do if Your Pinterest Account is Suspended for Spam
- The Final Part of the Suspended Account Saga
- Summary
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Tailwind’s SmartGuide function monitors your Pinterest activity to help avoid Pinterest account suspension. Read my review of Tailwind App for Pinterest for more details.
The Background to my Pinterest Account Being Suspended
Recently, I read a blog post about what to do when Pinterest’s spam detectors ban your account. By some ironic quirk of fate, the following day I checked my emails and saw the following email notification from confirm@account.pinterest.com, advising that my Pinterest account was suspended for spam!
Why the $@*^ Would Pinterest Suspend My Account for Spam?
I’m not an expert in Pinterest (yet 🙂 ), and I know right now I’m not especially good at creating highly pinspiring (did you see what I did there!) graphics to incite the Pinterest hoi-polloi to hop up and down in a re-pinning frenzy.
But spam?
I create all my own images for Pinterest and at up to two pins per day (yes, I know the gurus say you need to pin much more than this), I wouldn’t say with any degree of confidence I’m the most prolific of pinners the social media world has ever seen!
On the other hand I feel pretty confident that my pinning volume isn’t even remotely spammy.
Before I vent(ure) any further though, I’ll tell you that an account suspension for spam is the latest in a fairly confusing series of Pinterest experiences, which have seriously irritated me. Not just irritated me… but frustrated, annoyed and discombobulated all at the same time!
Did I mention I’m irritated?
The SideGains Pinterest Account History
I created the SideGains Pinterest account (@SideGains, if you’re interested) around July 2019 and:
- Claimed my domain.
- Linked it to my Instagram and YouTube channels.
- Updated my profile with a pic and optimized biography.
- Created some boards and added descriptions to them.
- Started pinning 1-2 pins per day.
Things rolled along pretty nicely considering I was only pinning my own images to my own boards and didn’t have oodles of time to devote to Pinterest marketing. By the end of October 2019, I had around 80 followers and was seeing monthly impressions of around 6k, which was growing on a daily basis. I was reasonably happy with this at the time, since I was just starting out.
Sometime at the beginning of September, I decided it was time for me to step up my Pinterest game and so I…
- Started researching a proper Pinterest strategy.
- Stopped pinning for around a week (while I researched).
- Joined 3 group boards.
After my week’s pinning hiatus, I’d created a new template for my images, started making new images based upon my new template and began pinning them to my boards. I also posted 3 images to the group boards I was now a member of (1 image in each).
This is where my problems seemed to start. No sooner had I started pinning images again, my impressions plummeted. I expected to see a dip in impressions when I stopped pinning, however I didn’t expect an immediate and huge drop when I began posting again!
And so it went on over several weeks until my impressions were running at double figures per day, sometimes less.
My Pinterest Account Stats
I had around 150 images pinned to my boards, which I wouldn’t say were especially good or bad… probably a bit mediocre on reflection, but by no means awful. I’ve seen a lot worse in other accounts and some of these have huge numbers of comments, repins and likes.
So… I stopped pinning images again: the definition of madness is repeating the same actions over and over and expecting a different result, right? It made no sense to try to bluster through it when something wasn’t working.
I read Pinterest’s help guides and even raised support tickets to try to get some inkling of an idea of what had caused the huge drop in impressions and why. Additionally, I searched online to look for others Pinterest accounts that had suffered the same issue.
In my research I heard about shadow bans, suspensions of specific pins and outright banning of accounts. However, nothing concrete to explain why I had experienced such a sudden downturn.
In truth I suspected Pinterest had hamstrung my account with some kind of penalty, but I could see no tangible evidence to prove this.
My Account Suspension
On the day my account was suspended, I logged into Pinterest as usual, around 08:15. I looked at my analytics reports and then decided I’d browse some of the accounts of people who follow me.
I clicked on one account, browsed around a few of the boards and then “close-upped” one of the pins I liked the look of.
The moment I clicked on the pinned image, my screen refreshed and up popped the following image:
My first reaction… WTF! As I mentioned earlier, I’ve never (knowingly) done anything spammy. I’m not even a minor pinner! The only thing I’m really guilty of is curating my own pins and not really engaging with others… which may or may not be a spamming signal.
At 08:35 (GMT) confirm@account.pinterest.com sent me an email explaining in a little more detail (but no specifics) why my Pinterest account was suspended.
It’s not a big account, but the posts I’d created up to that point had likely taken me many days of work over the months I’d been pinning. I was pretty flummoxed to say the least.
I decided to research to see if there was anything I could do. The following are the steps I took that resulted in my account being reinstated within 10 hours.
What to do if Your Pinterest Account is Suspended for Spam
The first thing I did was to click the link in the email confirm@account.pinterest.com sent me.
This auto-submitted my appeal at around 08:40.
Having hurriedly looked around for anything else I might do I came across the Pinterest Business Support email (creators-support@pinterest-business.zendesk.com) and thought… what the heck, I might as well send them a direct message too.
So at 08:44 I forwarded the Pinterest account suspension email along with the following message.
Almost immediately after I sent my email, I received the following auto-reply from creators-support@pinterest-business.zendesk.com.
My first thoughts? There’s not a lot of love in the creation of this Zendesk mail template for such a big social media player… but thanks for sending me a link to best practices!
At 08:44 I also received the following email from creators-support@pinterest-business.zendesk.com.
My first thoughts? There’s not a lot of love in the creation of this mail template either! But I was glad to have heard something back from the Business Support team.
All went quiet… and I went about my business until…
The Final Part of the Suspended Account Saga
At 17:12 I received this mail.
My first thoughts? Wow… and Pristine is a really lovely name.
That was that it seems. An over-zealous spam filter had picked up something about my account or my activity it didn’t like. No detailed explanation as to what specifically triggered my Pinterest account suspension so I can ensure it doesn’t happen again… which is a pity.
However, taking a positive view, I only had a small account I’d been working on for a few months and I managed to get my account unsuspended within 10 hours. I’ve heard of cases where people have lost their accounts after many years building them up. Some have lost thousands of followers and pins in the process.
How would you feel about that? Knowing how I felt when as site I worked on suffered a Google manual penalty and the devastation that caused… I’d feel completely floored.
In terms of my account, without any detailed explanation from Pinterest the only reasons I can think of as to why I was suspended for spam are that I left a spammy footprint:
- Only pinning my own images.
- Not actively involving myself in the Pinterest community and this might be a spam signal.
- Joining a group board where perhaps someone or something has been penalized?
So… I’ve begun pinning my own posts tentatively at a rate of two a day again and I’m going to be more active within the Pinterest community!
Update
I’ve gotten a lot smarter since I had my account suspended and decided to use a scheduling tool to help me grow my Pinterest account in the right way. After researching, I chose Tailwind.
Tailwind is primarily a scheduling tool for Pinterest but it does way more than just manage a queue of pins for you. It also provides detailed analytics about your Pinterest account, boards and individual pins.
More importantly for this post, Tailwind provides a super important function that monitors pinning frequency to ensure you don’t get your Pinterest account suspended.
I’ve been using it for several months and I’m seeing some very pleasing results… read my Tailwind App review to see my full appraisal and why I feel it’s a vital tool to help you manage all your Pinterest activity and prevent account suspension at the same time.
Alternatively, you can try Tailwind for free and use it to schedule 100 pins and 30 Instagram posts with no time limit. Click the banner below to set up a trial account.
Summary
- Make sure you read and understand the Pinterest Community Guidelines.
- Pinterest spam bots get it wrong!
- If you manage to get your Pinterest account suspended for spam, you CAN get it reinstated… as long as you are not actively spamming!
- Click the link in the suspension notification email to auto appeal the decision.
- Forward the suspension notification email to creators-support@pinterest-business.zendesk.com along with a polite request for them to reconsider, explaining your case.
- Use a Pinterest scheduler like Tailwind to help monitor your pinning frequency.
I guess the one big takeaway for me is that none of us can rely on one channel for traffic. We have very little recourse if our only source of traffic disappears suddenly, so it’s vital to diversify and work across the board to look for traffic in many places.
That’s it from me for now. I’ll update this post in a week or two, with details about how my account is performing and whether I am receiving impressions again!
Thanks for visiting.
Paul
Have you had your Pinterest account suspended for spam? What was your experience. Drop me a comment and let me know.
Great info!
I recently started a new Pinterest business account. My account was suspended for spam within the first hour, and after making two pins. I have been submitting requests for reinstatement unsuccessfully. I used your email suggestion, and hoping it work.
I do not have a business Pinterest account and don’t know why Pinterest say that I have committed spam. I mainly pin YouTube videos that I have watched and pin-able (Pinterest) images that I have seen and add it a shared cat board. This may have happened as I unsubscribed to notifications from Pinterest as I was getting so many that it was flooding my email inbox and it was overwhelming me.
Hello Paul
My Account got suspended for spam and it had to have happened in the night or early in the morning since I often fall asleep with my phone texting my friends so I must have had spammed while being really tired and not thinking of the consequences (me in a nutshell) and now I just feel bad.
Do you think I can get my account back?
Update my friend told me on discord he may have clicked on “report spam”
Hi Maxx… have you contacted Pinterest support?
Hi Paul, thanks for sharing your experience. My account was suspended 2 weeks ago and I have been contacting Pinterest through their help page but still no success. I have only received an automated message saying they will not reinstate the account because of spam. My account is new and I was not breaking the rules. I have just sent another email using the email address you gave provided, hoping that they will respond.
Hi Priscah… thanks for your comment.
I’d love to know how you get on as I’ve heard the creators email no longer works… I’m looking to update this post with any new information.
I think that link for creators no longer works. They sent me an email back saying they have retired that account. 🙁
Ahhh… that’s irritating Salma. Have you found another email to contact them?
Thanks for writing this. My account just got suspended – I am a new account and not spammy at all!
It’s a worry that this can happen at any time, it has really made me a bit wary.
I have only just started using Tailwind two days ago (I was pinning manually) and I thought it might have been because of that.
Hi Naomi. That’s very irritating for you… but follow my guide and I suspect you’ll get your account back again. I’d be interested to know how it works out for you.
Thanks Paul, it is back up and running again, yay. I got a ‘sorry, it was a mistake’ email from Pinterest. They were pretty quick in getting back to me I have to say.
I am pretty sure I know what caused it now. I decided to follow a few accounts in my niche – nothing over the top, around 20 – and I did it all at once in one go. Apparantly, this can set off a spam alert, it’s an automated thing. Due to the fact that I am a new account doing this it wouldn’t have gone in my favour.
That’s good news Naomi… Pinterest spam filters are very twitchy!
Hello! I tried the email address (creators-support@pinterest-business.zendesk.com) above but it says it is not active. Do you know if anything has changed?
Hi Nancy. I’ve just sent a test mail to that address and it hasn’t bounced back to me.
Did your email bounce or did you get a response back from Pinterest to say the account was not active?
I asked Pinterest for help because my videos pins stopped working. Then they suspended my account. Didn’t help the video issues, just suspended my biz account for ‘spam’. I don’t spam, I don’t double pin, I create my own pins for my own products. I love the concept of Pinterest, been with them since you had to have an invite to sign up, but they’ve gone off the rails.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! My account was reactivated thanks to your article.
Wow… I just replied to your previous comment and then this one came in! I’m so glad the article helped and I’m delighted to hear you have your account back again!
Hi Tammy. I’m sorry to hear this… it’s a massive pain and completely demoralising. Have you followed the steps in this post to try to get it back again?
Hi Paul
My Account got suspended.
I just followes 7-8 people at once.
🙁
No spam. I can’t even follow people in my niche. What’s the use!
Also ally pins are original and all my content
Hi Ishita. So sorry to hear that… Pinterest spam filters seem very temperamental. Try contacting support for help.
This just happened to me too and I don’t see what I could have done wrong. Reading your post really helped me calm my nerves and gave me some confidence to hopefully get my account back quickly. I’ve followed all your steps, fingers crossed that it will work out as it did for you 🙂
Hi Sara… thanks for your comment.
It’s frightening but you can get your suspension lifted… the process I’ve outlined has worked for other bloggers I know too.
Please let me know how you get on resolving it.