Search engine optimization (SEO) has been one of the biggest drivers of growth for Pinterest. However, it wasn’t always easy to find winning strategies at our scale. Traditionally, SEO tactics include trying out different known strategies and hoping for the best. You might have a good traffic day or a bad traffic day and not know what really triggered it, which often makes people think of SEO as magic rather than engineering.
Our SEO goal is to help billions of internet users discover Pinterest and find value in it as a visual bookmarking tool. Over time we’ve found the only way to verify if a change affects the user behavior positively is to run an A/B test. Unfortunately, we didn’t have similar tools to test search engine behavior, so we built an experiment framework and used it to turn “magic” into deterministic science.
