Pinterest: A recipe for spam

Looking for a recipe on Pinterest? Hope you like processed pork products, because the majority of pins you’ll find in the Pinterest “recipe” search is straight up spam. Disguised as logos from allceripes.com and French recipe database (I think?) Recettes De Chez Nous, these pins actually lead you to a wide variety of spammy sites. I found spammy sunglasses shops, spammy SEO farms disguised as financial help blogs, and other spammy pinterest boards filled with more spammy links. (I clicked through for research, OK?)

The other form of spam I’ve seen from Pinterest made it all the way to my inbox. Pretty simple way to game the system, this spammer mentioned us in a pin. Thanks for thinking of us, Valarie!

Spam has become a sort of right-of-passage for the modern social network, but not since I received a spam email containing blocks of text pulled from the Hobbit has a spamming scheme been so transparent. Even the comments on the spam pins are spammy:

I AM ALSO A HUMAN THAT LOVES THE SITE THAT HAS BEEN PINNED.

Anyone who’s used Pinterest even once knows that people pin acutual photos of things, not just site logos. If you’re gonna spam my recipe search, at least show me a picture of a spam fritters.

Spam fritters photographed (and presumably eaten) by flickr user lint01.

What are the worst spam pins you’ve seen on your favorite Pinterest boards or searches? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: Homepage