Some might say that Pinterest's behavior is covered under the "Spam and Malware" section on that page, but clearly Google does not agree with that interpretation of Google's rules or else the search results would have been removed by now.
There are other sites requiring logins that appear in Google results, e.g. LinkedIn, and Google clearly doesn't see that as a rule violation either. If that was really a rule, Google would need to block a lot of major news sites as well, e.g. NY Times, WSJ, FT, Economist, etc. I'll believe Google's interpretation of their own rules, rather than someone's interpretation on Reddit.
> "Google search results reflect content on the web"
That's what's being violated. The GoogleBot gets the content, but not a human visiting the site. That's not what a user expects. That's why Pinterest and LinkedIn should be removed from Google search indexes.
Addendum We're not even talking about violating Google's T&C here. It's about how their ranking algorithm works.
Try building a site and applying similar black-hat SEO tactics and watch your traffic disappear. Not for them.
You could make the same argument about the New York Times, WSJ, the Economist, FT, and many other newspapers of record: the Googlebot gets the content, and the users get a login page if they don't have an account. Should Google get rid of those as well? How can a search engine be useful if it doesn't include the most popular sites?
News aggregation operates under a very different model, and Google is constantly negotiating with news vendors.
>How can a search engine be useful if it doesn't include the most popular sites?
News has a relatively tiny set of providers. Information has a massive set of providers. Hence why Google can call the shots if you want to be in their engine. Pinterest only recently started getting ranked highly, owing to a weighting change, and it is a negative result for almost everyone.
You repeatedly keep citing the results themselves as validation that the results are correct. That isn't how it works, especially in the face of users saying "these Pinterest results suck and reduce my experience". Google constantly changes these things.
Most newspaper websites let you read N articles for free every month (/week/whatever). The WSJ is the major exception I'm aware of, but IIRC, they do actually show you the content if you click from the google results directly.
Cloaking -- presenting different content to a search bot than you would a visitor -- is against Google's rules, and many sites have been removed over the years for that reason. That they aren't currently removed hardly demonstrates that they've assessed whether it's allowed or not, and is specious logic.
If the search results lead to frustration -- and every pinterest result does -- that doesn't help Google. Ergo, those sites eventually get removed.
Some might say that Pinterest's behavior is covered under the "Spam and Malware" section on that page, but clearly Google does not agree with that interpretation of Google's rules or else the search results would have been removed by now.
There are other sites requiring logins that appear in Google results, e.g. LinkedIn, and Google clearly doesn't see that as a rule violation either. If that was really a rule, Google would need to block a lot of major news sites as well, e.g. NY Times, WSJ, FT, Economist, etc. I'll believe Google's interpretation of their own rules, rather than someone's interpretation on Reddit.