Pinterest Holiday Pins: Fix the Page Before You Make New Ones

Everybody asks me when to publish a holiday pin. Almost nobody asks where it lands.

Your best pin from last December is still out there, still ranking, still getting saved. I want to talk about what it's sending people to. The Pinterest holiday conversation has been stuck on publishing dates for about a decade. Post 60 days early. Start Christmas in July. I've said all of that here, and I still mean it.

The half that never gets talked about is the page on the other end of the pin.

Timing Only Buys You Year One

Get the pin up early enough and the season takes care of itself. That's half right, which is the most expensive kind of wrong.

Timing decides whether your pin gets seen the first year. Year two and year three get decided somewhere else, and most people never go back to look.

In most accounts I open, the pattern is: build the pin, pin it, forget it, make a new one next October because the old one must be tired. The old one is fine. The page underneath got old.

Pinterest Holiday Pins: Fix the Page Before You Make New Ones: Spotify

Pinterest Holiday Pins: Fix the Page Before You Make New Ones: Apple

What Pinterest Actually Reads

In August, Pinterest's search team published a paper about how they measure whether a pin answers what someone searched for. Sitting in the methods section is a list of everything their relevance model reads about a single pin. The pin title and description. The titles of the boards people saved it to. The searches it has historically done well for. And the landing page title and description.

One caution, because somebody will message me saying landing pages are a confirmed ranking factor worth 11%. The August paper is about measurement, about how Pinterest judges relevance inside its own experiments. A second paper from 2024 covers the production relevance model, the one deciding what you actually see. That one lists link-based text data right alongside pin titles, descriptions, boards, and engaged queries.

Finding Your Pages

I have a post that still ranks, still gets pinned, and has a year in the headline I'd rather not say into a microphone.

Eleven minutes to fix. I've had longer arguments with my five-year-old.

Open your analytics and set the date range to this time last year through the end of December. Pinterest cuts you off around six months, so use Google Analytics to go further back.

Now sort by outbound clicks. Impressions tell you a pin got shown. An outbound click tells you somebody wanted what was behind it enough to leave Pinterest. Today, that's the only signal that matters.

Take your top ten. One of mine was "how to use Pinterest story pins for business." Story pins don't exist anymore.

And if the pins driving those clicks belong to somebody else who pinned your page, that's the best version of this problem. They did the distribution, and the destination is still yours to fix.

What to Fix, and What to Leave Alone

Start with the landing page, because that's the one costing you money. Discontinued products, out of stock items, a service you stopped offering, a 404. That's losing the sale after Pinterest already won you the click.

Then your meta description, the sentence sitting next to your page title in what the model sees. A lot of sites auto-generate that from four years ago, so yours may currently say something like "well, hi friends." Then search-replace any year you named in the body copy.

For a gift guide or seasonal roundup, update the page you already have. It holds the rankings and the saved pins, and a brand new URL starts at zero on both. My test for clients: if somebody searching next November would still be happy to land on it, it's an evergreen page wearing a year by accident. Take the year off and keep it.

Three things stay exactly where they are. The URL, the pin, and the board. Rewrite your slug for the new year and every pin pointing there is aimed at a 404 or a redirect chain. An old year in a URL is ugly and harmless. A broken URL is neither.

Final Pin Drop

Please stop deleting the old pin and re-uploading the same image so it counts as fresh. You're trading a graduated pin with real search history for one carrying nothing, in the worst month to hand Pinterest a blank slate.

Make new pins too. Just stop letting them stand in for a ten-minute page fix. Pinterest is running a search index, and your page is part of the record it keeps about your pin. Update the page and you've updated the pin's file.

Sort last season by outbound clicks, take the top seven to ten, and group by destination. They'll collapse into three to five pages. Fix those, then stop. Page six earned 40 clicks last year and doesn't deserve your whole October.

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