Pinterest Offers the Option to Opt Out
Receiving a “pin” from your website to Pinterest is a good thing, right? It can bring a ton of traffic to your website or blog, and may introduce a new audience to your products, services, or informational websites. You could even come across new Facebook friends and Twitter followers. For many business owners, this is a dream come true. Unfortunately, it may be the worst nightmare of some other business owners.
The Problem
There are some businesses that simply do not want the images from their websites or blogs to be shared with the general public through Pinterest. An example of this may be an artist placing images of their work on a website to make sales. If the images are spread around Pinterest and make their way onto Facebook, Google Plus, twitter, and other social networking sites, they become less valuable to the artist. Who wants to pay high dollar for an image that they have seen a million times before all over the Internet?These artists can place watermarks on their images to decrease the chance that others will pin them onto their boards, but some images are still bound to end up on Pinterest if the site receives any amount of search engine traffic. This becomes a nightmare as the owners of the images have to patrol social networking sites in search of unwanted postings of their work.
The Pinterest Copyright Solutions
Pinterest has always allowed website owners and site users to flag images that may be violating copyright laws. It is in the interest of the site to quickly remove these pinned images, since it could lead to a lawsuit if they are found to be negligent in taking them down and it is a serious copyright violation. The problem is that many affected website owners do not discover the use of their images as pins until the images have circulated the Internet for quite awhile.Now, Pinterest is going the extra mile by offering a small bit of code that website owners can opt to add onto their websites. This ensures that no one can take images from their website and pin them directly onto their boards.
With this code properly implemented into the code for the website, users trying to pin from the site will find that it is blocked. Their attempts will be unsuccessful as long as that code remains in place.
Of course, website owners will still have to take other precautions to ensure that their images cannot be downloaded into a site visitor’s computer and then indirectly pinned to Pinterest or another site without crediting the original source. Unfortunately, this has always been the case for website owners and bloggers displaying personal images online.
Most people that care about this type of copyright violation will already have precautions in place to prevent download copying from their site. They will already be using watermarks to ensure the original owner is at least always credited if someone finds a way to get their images.
Will You Opt In or Opt Out?
Deciding whether to opt in for Pinterest attention or step away from the limelight is a personal decision. You have to think about all of the following as you work through the process:1. The majority of people who pin to their Pinterest boards will use the taskbar downloaded from the site, so you will get credit as the original source of the image. Most do not rip the image off your website and pretend they created it. Many website owners and bloggers have received a flood of new traffic after an image was picked up by a pinner.
2. If you do not have serious copyright issues with an image being shared, then it doesn’t hurt to allow others to enjoy it as well. If it doesn’t negatively affect your business, then why not opt in?
3. You have to add code to your site to opt out, so it is much easier and faster to leave your site open just in case a pinner comes by and likes what they see.
4. If you really need more traffic to your site, then this could be a great way to accomplish that goal for free. The link alone from the Pinterest site often help to not only give sites some direct traffic, but help in boosting their search engine rankings as well.
Most website owners and bloggers love Pinterest because it is free exposure. Just make sure it doesn’t affect your business negatively because of Pinterest copyright issues when you choose to enjoy the limelight with everyone else.
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