3 steps to verify your website on Pinterest

Show off your website url on Pinterest

Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketers, Web publishers — anyone with a Pinterest account and a website.

You may have missed the announcement Thursday that Pinterest is now giving website owners a way to verify your website on your Pinterest profile page, whether it’s your own page or your brand’s page.

The idea is that by attaching your online identity to your Pinterest account, it brings a little more authority and credibility to your pages there — or, as Pinterest puts it, they’re letting you “express who you are.” It’s a good idea to go ahead and do that, since the pinboard-style image sharing website is now the third most popular social networking site, behind only Facebook and Twitter. (I’m at http://pinterest.com/jdlasica, come say hi and show off your own boards.)

3 steps to verify, but you need access to your site

1To begin, log in to your Pinterest account and select Settings in the dropdown under your icon at the top right. Scroll down and click the Verify Website button next to your site’s url. Note that Pinterest only supports verification for top-level domains, like www.yourcompany.com (or .org, .biz, .co, etc.).

2Pinterest will then take you to https://pinterest.com/domain/verify/. The page should look something like this:

You’ll notice the top line of the instructions includes a link for you to download a small html file. Download it. Then upload it to the root level of your website. It’s simplest to use a ftp client to upload it; make sure it’s at the root level (that is, /) so that Pinterest can find it. (If ftp scares you, find the office techie and she can do this in seconds.) Once uploaded, you should be able to call it up in a browser, just like Pinterest can see it. Here’s mine: http://socialmedia.biz/pinterest-9f4ac.html

3Return to the same page as in step 2 to complete the verification process. Click the link that says, “Click here to complete the process.” That’s it!

When you do, and if you uploaded the file to its proper place, Pinterest will be happy and will confirm that you’ve been verified. Readers will then see a checkmark next to your domain in search results. They will also see the full website URL and checkmark on your profile page. See the image at the top of this article. Pinterest only allows one verified domain per account.

As TheNextWeb reports: “The new features comes just a week after Pinterest launched user blocking and reporting. It’s clear the service is looking to step up its image in the area of security and privacy, which is particularly important given all the hacking and spamming that’s happening on the site.”

Any questions?
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.