Website Marked as Spam on Pinterest?!

I discovered a little (ok, not so little in my world!) unpleasant surprise the other day: Pinterest has flagged my website, Fitness Family Food Fun, and the links that are connected to Pins as SPAM and BLOCKED my entire website from Pinterest. "Blacklisted" as they call it :(

While blogging and sharing some of my blog posts and recipes on Pinterest is new to me, I have personally been using Pinterest for a few years now. I love it...I love DIY projects, searching out and trying new recipes, and to be totally honest - I'm not the most savvy at putting outfits together...and I just get so much inspiration and ideas from it.

It has also been one of my biggest traffic sources since starting a blog. Luckily because I am still so new I am not using my blog as a form of income, but I've read of this happening to many bloggers who depend on their traffic to determine their income potential - and a few days without their top #1-#3 spot traffic referrer can have a huge impact.

This is the message, more or less, that you will currently get if you try to click on a pin with a link to my blog depending if you are on a computer or phone. You click Go Back and thats it. No warning but still able to follow through - Just blocked all together from viewing the link, and my entire website blacklisted as well from Pinterest.

I immediately contacted Pinterest and after a couple days and emailing back and forth with automated responses, I was sent this email:

"Fewf!"....or so I thought. All was back up and running smoothly for all about 3 hours before I noticed my blog website was blocked AGAIN! And I hadn't even pinned or repined anything containing links from my blog in the time period - so how they conclude my website as being spammy is beyond me. The first time it happened - Ok, I freaked a little but summed it up to "mistakes happen". The second time it happened - lets just say pissed off is an understatement.

Not only have I missed out on traffic for 5 days now, what really bothers me the most is that Fitness Family Food Fun and the idea of it being spammy is out there - for everyone to see and believe. That was the worst for me. I am just starting out with my blog, and the first impression people are going to get is it is nothing more than a spammy junk website that might contain inappropriate or unsafe content :(

I am not entirely sure why this is happening. I have read through Pinterests terms and conditions and also through their FAQ's when it comes to blacklisted websites and I am confident my pins and website do not fall into what they consider "Spammy". With all the reading I have done, I cannot find any definitive rules. While there ARE lots of rules, nothing specific enough that actually explains in detail what causes this to happen to good websites.

I do understand Pinterest wants to protect the legitimate users from the many real spammers there are on Pinterest - What I don't understand is how with the dozens and dozens of pins many other, much larger, Pinterest accounts upload and share from their websites everyday, how my measly 8 pins from my website that I have only shared on my personal boards over the course of 2 weeks gets blocked...? One thing I have learned is unfortunately it only takes 1 person (maybe 2) to "flag" a Pin as spammy and your entire website gets blacklisted. No confirmation from Pinterest to verify whether or not a link is indeed spam when a Pin is flagged - just immediate blacklist, no questions asked.

Thoughts or words of advice? Here I am waiting again for a reply from Pinterest - hopefully saying they have unblocked my website for a second time, so anything is welcome as I am now feeling like I need to walk on eggshells anytime I do anything with Pinterest...