Are There Really Banned Words on Pinterest®? We Tested 11,761 of Them

Key findings

What this means for you

If you have a list of words you avoid in titles and descriptions, you can probably throw most of it away. The words themselves are not the problem. ‘Free’, ‘secret’, ‘amazing’, ‘guaranteed’, ‘click’, ‘diet’: pins that use them land exactly where pins that do not use them land, once you compare like with like.

What the data does show is that Pinterest search is not fond of pins that read like adverts or listings. ‘Sponsored’, ‘order now’, ‘link in bio’, a phone number, a platform name, a stock-file format: each of those marks a pin as something other than an idea someone wants to save, and each tracks a real gap. The word is the symptom. Taking ‘sponsored’ out of an advert does not stop it being an advert.

A note on how to read the numbers. In every table below, a ‘ranking change’ is measured against comparable pins (same niche, same search-volume band). A positive number means those pins sit higher in search, a negative number means they sit lower, the same way a ranking change reads in Pinfluence Discover. ‘Top-10 reach’ is how often they reach the top 10 relative to what their niche and volume mix would predict; 1.00 means no difference, higher is better.

The one genuinely new thing here is about recipes. The biggest niche on Pinterest has a habit of pasting the whole recipe card into the pin description, and those pins rank well behind comparable food pins. Rich Pins, which pull the recipe data from your site and display it properly, rank well ahead. So keep Rich Pins on, put the recipe on your site, and put the dish, the occasion and the phrase people search in the description, which is the lever we measured in where to put your keyword on Pinterest.

And if you have seen a sudden drop and suspect a word did it, it almost certainly did not. The pattern that looks like a gate in our data applies to a short list of regulated topics, not to marketing vocabulary. For a sudden loss of reach, our distribution limits study is the place to start.

The 146 words everyone warns you about

We grouped the folklore list into eight clusters and compared pins containing each word with other pins in the same niche and the same search-volume band.

Seven of the eight clusters sit within a quarter of a position of comparable pins, and most reach the top 10 slightly more often than expected, not less. Commerce is the one cluster with a gap, and it is three positions: small, consistent, and best read as ‘shop-listing pins rank a little lower’ rather than ‘these words are banned’. The suggestive-wording cluster is everyday fashion and beauty vocabulary (‘nude’ is mostly a shade of lipstick or heels); it is not adult content, which is a different story and comes up in the visibility section below.

The famous ones that turn out to be fine

‘Free’ is the word creators most often tell each other to avoid, and it is the most thoroughly tested word in this study: 1.4 million appearances, 0.06 positions from comparable pins. ‘Save this pin’, ‘ultimate’ and ‘cheap’ rank higher than comparable pins, which fits what wins search in general: list-style and how-to phrasing. ‘Hacks’, ‘keto’, ‘detox’ and ‘work from home’ rank higher too. Nothing on this table behaves like a penalty.

One nuance worth knowing: ‘free’ moves with the niche. In DIY and crafts, education and finance, pins with ‘free’ rank three to five positions higher (free printables, worksheets, templates). In art and design they rank five positions lower (free stock downloads). That is the kind of pin, not the word.

The words that do cost positions

Out of the whole folklore list, these are the words that cleared the bar we set for ‘this hurts’: roughly nine positions lower than comparable pins, or 0.8 times the expected top-10 reach, which is the worst 5% of all 11,761 words we scored.

Read down the list and a pattern appears. Every one of these phrases does one of two jobs: it tells the reader this is an advert (‘sponsored’, ‘ad’, ‘promo code’, ‘order now’, ‘shop now’, ‘deals’), or it asks the reader to do something for the pinner (‘comment below’, ‘follow me’, ‘follow us’, ‘link in bio’, ‘giveaway’). ‘Link in bio’ is the single most common one at 90,000 appearances, and it is also a fingerprint of pins auto-published from Instagram, which we covered in where pins link.

The cleanest comparison in the whole study is ‘sponsored’ against ‘affiliate’. Both are disclosures. Both usually sit in the description. A ‘sponsored’ disclosure tracked 12.5 positions lower than comparable pins across 23,000 appearances; an ‘affiliate’ disclosure tracked 0.2 positions higher across 114,000. Whatever is being measured, it is not the act of disclosing.

Beyond the list: every word Pinterest users write

A list of 146 words can only confirm or deny the folklore. So we also scored every word that appears on at least 2,000 ranking pins in our sample, 11,761 words in all, on the same three tests. The words that rank lowest are not on any creator’s list.

Platforms and stock sites. ‘Spreadshirt’ 42 positions lower, ‘Freepik’ 23 lower, ‘Polyvore’ 15, ‘Pngtree’ 15, the LTK affiliate tags (‘liketk’, ‘liketkit’, ‘shopltk’) 14 to 18 lower, ‘Depop’ 14, ‘Poshmark’ and ‘shopmycloset’ 13, plus file formats (‘psd’ 14 lower, ‘dxf’ 16, ‘svg’ 8.6, ‘vector’ 11) and ‘free download’ 8.1 lower. Among the bigger platforms: ‘YouTube’ 12 lower, ‘Etsy’ 7 lower (231,000 pins), ‘Instagram’ 5.1 lower (331,000 pins), ‘Amazon’ 4.8 lower. ‘Pinterest’ in the text ranks three positions higher.

The recipe card. This is the finding we did not expect. Food pins whose description carries the measurements and the method sit 9 to 17 positions lower than comparable food pins and reach the top 10 at roughly half the expected rate. It is not the length of the description: long food descriptions without recipe words rank fine (300 to 600 characters, 3 positions higher). It is the recipe card itself, which crowds out the phrase someone would actually search with ‘tsp’, ‘tbsp’ and ‘preheat’. Our description length study found the same shape from the other direction.

The obvious question is whether these are Rich Pins, since Rich Pins pull recipe data from your site. They are not. About 1 in 500 of the recipe-card pins carries Rich Pin data, against nearly 1 in 100 of other food pins; these are ordinary pins with the card pasted into the description by hand or by a plugin. Rich Pins go the other way entirely.

A recipe Rich Pin ranks 30 positions higher than a comparable food pin and reaches the top 10 at 1.8 times the expected rate; across every niche, article, recipe and product Rich Pins rank 21 to 31 positions higher. Part of that gap is simply that Rich Pins come from real websites with proper page data (pins from the same kind of source without a Rich Pin block still rank 16 positions higher), and we are looking at Rich Pins on their own in a separate study. So the advice is not ‘keep the recipe off Pinterest’. It is: let Rich Pins carry the recipe, and use the description for the dish, the occasion and the words people search.

Pins not written in English. German, French, Indonesian and Portuguese function words (‘untuk’, ‘dengan’, ‘offre’, ‘enthalten’, ‘pedido’) sit 13 to 22 positions lower than comparable pins. That is expected rather than a penalty: our index is the English-language version of Pinterest search, so a pin written in another language is competing for English searches. It is worth knowing if you pin in two languages from one account, and nothing more than that.

At the other end, the words that rank highest are specific, searchable nouns: ‘stardew’ 50 positions higher, ‘sims’ 45, ‘sonic’ 42, ‘snoopy’ 27, ‘shrimp’ 23. Generic marketing words do nothing in either direction; a thing people are actually looking for does a lot.

The words that rarely reach search at all

Ranking only tells you about pins that got in. To see whether anything is being kept out, we compared how often each word appears in pins that rank in search with how often it appears in pins at large (every pin we have seen on boards, profiles and related-pin feeds). A normal word appears in search at about 0.84 times its rate in the wild; the bottom 5% of ordinary words sit below 0.49.

This is the one place the data looks like a rulebook, and it is Pinterest’s published rulebook, not the creators’ one. Words for regulated goods (vaping, cannabis, weapons, knives, counterfeit and replica goods) and for adult services reach search at a tenth to two fifths of a normal word’s rate. So do sensitive mental-health terms (‘depression’, ‘suicide’, ‘eating disorder’), which matches Pinterest’s compassionate-search feature that routes those searches to curated resources. In every case the pattern is a gate, not a demotion: the few pins that do get in rank as high as or higher than comparable pins.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is good news. Pinterest’s Community Guidelines say it limits the distribution of content about weapons, drugs, tobacco and adult services, and that it steers sensitive searches toward support rather than ranking them. The data says it does exactly that, and only that. The marketing vocabulary creators have been warned about is not on the list.

The weight-loss words are the clearest counter-example. ‘Weight loss’ reaches search at 1.26 times a normal word’s rate, ‘belly fat’ at 1.63, ‘flat stomach’ at 2.31. Diet content is over-represented in search, not filtered. ‘Free’ sits at 0.83, which is the median for ordinary vocabulary.

Does it hurt small accounts more?

A common version of the claim is that established accounts get away with words that sink a new one. We split every cluster by the follower count of the account that published the pin. (Follower tiers compare within the same niche and volume band, as always.)

No. If anything the accounts with more followers carry the slightly lower numbers. ‘Link in bio’ is seven to ten positions lower in every tier; ‘free’ is within a position and a half in every tier. There is no version of this data in which the same word costs a small account more than a large one.

Spam signals that are not words

Finally we checked the things people worry about that are not vocabulary at all: capitals, punctuation, contact details.

A phone number or an email address in the description is the strongest structural marker in the study, eight positions lower and a fifth off the top-10 reach, which again reads as ‘this is a business listing’. A URL costs about four. ALL CAPS, the thing most lists lead with, costs about one position and reaches the top 10 slightly more often. The small emoji and hashtag effects match our emoji study and hashtag study.

How we did this

This study uses the Pinfluencing.com research index, which organizes public information from Pinterest® search results.

These cuts cover a sample of 23.6 million ranked pins and 61.8 million search appearances drawn from about 1.3 million searches across 25 niches, indexed through early October 2026, plus 9.1 million pins seen outside search results for the visibility comparison and a 15% sample of our full pin table (153 million pins) for the Rich Pin comparison. Each row records where a pin ranked for a given search, where 1 is the top, across up to roughly 250 results per search.

Frequently asked questions

About the data and Pinfluence Discover

Every number here comes from the Pinfluencing.com research index of public Pinterest® search results, indexed through early October 2026.

If the words you avoid are not what is holding your pins back, the useful work is the opposite: finding the phrases people in your niche actually search and writing them into titles and descriptions. Pinfluence Discover is built for that, with a free account that includes 7 days of Pro, then keyword searches every day, no credit card needed.