Yep, exactly. I find that Pinterest is slowly making me less and less likely to use Google. Pinterest shows up as the dominating search result even or very specific long tail keywords where one could argue that a collection of images on a login-gated page is not helpful at all.

I don't use google for images anymore because of this.

Bing is terrible, but it's better than google.

Which means that google is worse than terrible.

Yandex is great for images these days.

> Isn't this exactly the kind of black-hat SEO that they are usually downranking or banning sites for?

How is it blackhat to do exactly what Google wants?

Using tricks at the detriment of the user to the benefit of the service is blackhat. Pinterest is doing these tricks to their benefit at the extreme detriment to everyone but themselves.

It's weird to blame Pinterest for Google's choice to promote the site. Sure Pinterest wants to rank highly, but they aren't tricking Google. Google knows how popular they choose to make Pinterest results, and how much most users like those results.

If I make an algorithm to rank sites, and you figure out the internals of that algo and manipulate your behavior to rank at the top, that's bad and not the same as being Google's choice, at least not directly.

My friend, Google tells you how this works. Pinterest doesn't have secret knowledge.