Why Your Pinterest Rankings Jump Around Every Day (and When to Actually Worry)

This happens to everyone (it happened to me in my first month), usually about a week after they start checking their rankings.

Monday, your pin is fifth for the phrase you care about.

Tuesday it’s eleventh.

Wednesday it’s fourth.

By Thursday you can’t find it on the first screen at all, and on Friday you’re rewriting the title at 11pm, convinced something’s broken.

Nothing’s broken.

That’s just what Pinterest positions do.

The trick (and it really is a learnable trick) is telling the everyday wobble apart from a move that means something, so you only ever react to the second one.

Why positions wobble at all

Pinterest search isn’t a league table that updates once a night.

It’s a grid that gets put together fresh for every search, and lots of small things feed into it.

Different people, different grids

Results are personalised, and they can vary with where someone is and what they’ve engaged with before.

Even a clean, logged-out check is one sample of a grid that shifts a little from person to person.

So two checks 24 hours apart are really two slightly different samples, and some difference between them is guaranteed.

I once searched the same phrase on my phone and my laptop at the same kitchen table, 2 minutes apart, and a few of the pins near the top were different.

That was the day I stopped writing down exact positions.

New pins keep arriving

New pins get published for popular phrases every day, and Pinterest tends to give fresh ones a chance to show what they can do.

When one gets tried near the top, everything below it slides down a place or two for a while.

If the newcomer can’t hold its spot, everything slides back.

Your own pin gets tested

Same thing in reverse.

Pinterest may show your pin a bit higher or lower to see how people respond.

That’s a good thing, even when it looks alarming, because it’s how a pin earns a better position in the first place.

Neighbours move too

Your position is relative.

If the pin just above yours has a brilliant week of saves, it can climb away, and a pin below can overtake you without you doing anything at all.

A ranking is a comparison.

It isn’t a grade.

Seasons reshuffle everything

This one moves whole searches at once.

As interest in a phrase rises or falls with the calendar, Pinterest changes what it shows, and every pin in the top 20 can shift together.

The Pinterest seasonal calendar is well worth a look if your phrases are the kind that do this.

My rule before touching anything

Here it is.

It’s saved me from dozens of pointless edits, and a couple of properly bad ones.

• Under 5 places is weather. Moves smaller than that happen constantly and mean nothing on their own. I don’t even write them down any more.
• 5 or more, once, gets a note. Write it down with the date. Don’t change anything yet.
• A new band for 7 days is real. If the pin lived in the top 5 and now lives somewhere between sixth and twentieth for a full week, something has changed. Time to look at why.
• A new band for 14 days is worth acting on. By then you’ve got a pattern rather than a moment, and a calm, considered change makes sense.

Five places isn’t a magic number, by the way.

It’s just the point below which I’ve never once found a move that was worth reacting to.

Reacting to noise makes it worse

This is the bit nobody expects.

Editing a pin because of normal wobble isn’t just wasted effort.

It can actually hurt.

When you change a title or description, Pinterest has to re-read the pin and work out again which searches it belongs in.

While that happens the position can bounce around even more, which looks like proof something’s wrong, which tempts you to edit again.

I once watched a friend chase a perfectly healthy pin right out of the top 20 that way, one anxious rewrite at a time (she still brings it up).

When a wobble really is a warning

A few patterns are worth taking seriously even before the fortnight is up.

• Every tracked pin dropped on the same day. One pin moving is normal. All of them moving at once, in the same direction, points at something account-wide, so check your account health before you touch a single title.
• The pin vanished from every phrase, not just one. That’s more likely a problem with the pin or its link than a ranking change, and pins that disappeared from search walks through the causes.
• It dropped right after you changed something. A new link, a deleted board, a rewritten description. Timing isn’t proof. But it’s the first place to look.

If none of those fit and the pin has simply moved into a new band and stayed there, you’re looking at a real change rather than a wobble.

Working out why a pin dropped is the next step, and the rank tracking guide shows where it fits in the bigger picture.

Reading your numbers calmly

The best change you can make is to stop looking at single days.

Look at the band a pin has lived in over the last 7 to 14 days, and compare it with the band it lived in before that.

If you’re checking by hand, that means once a week rather than every morning, done the same careful way every time and written in the same notebook.

Mine’s a cheap spiral one with a coffee ring on the cover, and it’s a bit scruffy.

But it works.

If you’re tracking lots of phrases, it means leaning on something that keeps every reading, so you see the shape and not just the latest dot.

That’s how PinPinterest treats rank.

It records where the top pins for each saved phrase rank every time the phrase is crawled, draws the recent readings as a small line so you see the shape instead of one scary number, and says “measured” with a date when a reading isn’t fresh rather than inventing a flat line.

Its alerts are saved for jumps of 5 places or more, for the same reason as my rule, because anything smaller is weather.

Next Monday, then

So here’s what I’d do if your pin just jumped from fifth to eleventh.

Nothing.

Write it down, close the tab, put the kettle on.

Then check again next Monday with a coffee.

Most weeks it’s back where it was, and when it isn’t, you’ll have a week of notes telling you what changed.