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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

google obeys the

  <meta name="robots" content="noimageindex"> 

  - or -

  <meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex">

meta tag. well, i guess pinterest didn't knew about it and instead reinvented - an unknown, obscure, niche - wheel, again. (see: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...)

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Showing up in an image index (generated by crawlers) is different enough from showing up on Pinterest (curated by humans) that allowing one to make the choices independently is totally reasonable.

it's a stretchy argument, but one i'm going make anyway: before the crawl, there is discovery. discovery is the process of knowing all the URLs to pass to the crawler.

discovery is fueled by

  * links
  * sitemap.xml

who creates links (and sitemaps)? humans (either editorially or programmatically, but at some point humans were involved in the link creation process)

defining the pinterest fetching process as "not indexing" or "not crawling" seems a little bit unfair against your friendly neighborhood googlebot.

also if pinterest is "currated by humans" then the pin-tag would be unnecessary. a simple plain text "DO NOT PIN THIS" message in the article/product/image/.. (whatever people pin these days) description would be sufficient.

Well at least they should honor that too since clearly the owner does not want their photos discoverable ( plus by crossing over to pinterest they become indexable, right?)

Yeah, but this way they get to write a blogpost that's basically...

"So do you guys know how popular we are? SO popular."

But they get to do it under the cover of being both helpful and community-minded. It's clever.

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