Made some updates to the Strategy Breakdowns website.

Fonts, spacing, navigation, a few satisfying interactions.

Right now, I’m trying to reimagine the footer. It’s too-often-forgotten real estate, so when you find a good one, it’s a treat.

Curious - what are some of your favourite website ‘easter eggs’? The ones you screenshot, share around, and never forget.

Looking for inspo - reply to this email and let me know!

— Tom

P.S. One day I’d love to get closer to my original vision. Bit of an architecture lift for a non-techie, but feels more and more possible by the day!

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The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Pinterest pulled off one of the most successful growth heists in tech history: hijacking search traffic from Google Images (their primary competitor and market leader).

Google Images was where people went to discover visual content. Roughly 1-1.5 billion times per day.

The challenge was that Pinterest pages were essentially invisible to search engines.

Google's crawler reads text, not images. A platform built on photos had no words to rank.

The solution: aggregate all the text that users were already generating (board titles, pin descriptions, comments etc) and structure it into SEO-friendly pages.

Every time a user added a pin or curated a board, they indexed another Pinterest page on Google Images, creating a new traffic entry point.

Based on the pin- and board-level metadata, Pinterest built programmatic "explore" pages designed specifically to match high-volume Google queries.

Then, they put a login wall in front of everything. Pins, boards, and explore pages.

You could see the preview in Google Images.

But to view the actual content → you had to sign up.

At its peak, the scale was staggering: 800 million+ pages indexed, 50 billion+ pins, over 360 million monthly organic visits directly from Google Images.

While unbelievably effective at generating signups (millions per month), the strategy drew significant criticism.

28,000+ Chrome users even installed an extension called “Unpinterested!” specifically to remove Pinterest from their search results.

Eventually Google fought back. The March 2018 algorithm update wiped out 5+ million keyword rankings overnight.

A temporary arbitrage, sure, but one that converted millions of Google searchers into registered users.

Well worth studying. Here’s exactly how it worked.

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

Most SEO strategies require dedicated content teams.

Pinterest's required zero - their users were already doing the work, they just didn't know it.

Pinterest architected their site in a way that every board title, every pin description, every saved image was quietly feeding Google's crawler.

The insight: users naturally create keyword-rich content (board titles, pin descriptions, comments, repins) when they organise things for themselves. A board titled "Minimalist Kitchen Ideas" is perfect for SEO without anyone trying.

Pinterest just needed to aggregate that user-generated-text and make it visible to search engines.

The result was a content flywheel: users create boards → Google indexes boards → searchers find boards → searchers become users → new users create more boards.

They created three templated page types, specifically designed to capture Google queries, that could be generated automatically at massive scale:

Pin pages - Individual images with aggregated metadata

Board pages - User-generated collections with keyword-rich titles

Explore pages - Programmatically generated landing pages targeting specific Google queries

The explore pages were the most aggressive play. When someone searched "bedroom ideas" or "wedding inspiration," Pinterest had generated a page specifically for that query - populated with relevant pins, optimised for that exact search term.

800 million+ pages indexed. No internally hand-crafted content. Templated structures filled with user-generated material. One framework = infinite pages.

The login wall was Pinterest's most controversial tactic - and eventually, its downfall. Google searchers couldn't see content in full without signing up, and Google noticed.

The mechanic was simple: show a preview in Google results, but force a signup before revealing anything.

When they experimented with:

… the first treatment earned 2–3x more signups than the 3rd treatment, without reducing retention or engagement.

The problem was, users who didn't want to sign up bounced back to Google and tried another result. This signal told Google that Pinterest wasn't satisfying search intent.

In March 2018, Google's "broad core algorithm update" specifically targeted this behaviour.

Pinterest lost 5+ million keywords overnight. And again the next day. And the next.

High-volume terms like "bedroom ideas" (previously ranking #5) disappeared. The /explore pages stopped ranking altogether.

The lesson: you can borrow traffic from a platform, but that platform sets the rules.

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Casey Winters grew Pinterest from 40M to 200M users.

This is him explaining exactly how the "content loop" framework works.

Original sauce. Worth a read.

Optimising 800m+ pages legitimately requires rigorous application of the scientific method.

This is Pinterest’s engineering team explaining how they turned "SEO magic" into deterministic experiments. One test led to a 30% traffic increase.

Includes the exact methodology they used to validate which changes moved the needle, then roll them out at tremendous scale.

The prequel to Pinterest’s SEO machine:

Their now-legendary ‘invite-only’ strategy.

→ Exclusivity psychology

→ Limited invites per user (artificial scarcity)

→ 50% month-on-month growth for 2 years straight

There’s something every company can learn from this playbook.

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