Pinterest Rich Pins sound like a marketing thing, but the actual implementation is a developer's job. If a client asks you to "set up Rich Pins" and you've never done it before, here's exactly what you need to know, no fluff, just the technical breakdown.
What Pinterest actually needs from your HTML
Pinterest validates Rich Pins by crawling a URL you submit and looking for either Open Graph meta tags or schema.org structured data in the
. For most blog or article-based sites, Open Graph is the simpler path.The minimum viable set of Open Graph tags for Article Rich Pins:
For product Rich Pins (e-commerce), you'll also need:
Validating before submission
Pinterest provides a validator at developers.pinterest.com/tools/url-debugger. Paste in one of your URLs and it will tell you exactly which tags it found, which are missing, and whether you're eligible for Rich Pin approval.
If you're seeing errors, the most common culprits are: the og:type tag being missing, the og:image URL returning a 404, or the image dimensions being too small (Pinterest recommends a minimum of 1000px on the longest side).
Using schema.org as an alternative
If you prefer structured data over Open Graph, Pinterest also accepts JSON-LD schema markup for articles. A basic implementation:
Both methods work. If you're already implementing JSON-LD for Google's structured data requirements (which you should be), the Pinterest benefit is essentially free, same markup, dual benefit.
The folks at Mittal Technologies have written about this overlap between technical SEO and platform-specific requirements, and it's a good read if you're trying to build a unified metadata strategy rather than patching each platform separately.
After your tags are in place, submit your validation URL through Pinterest's Rich Pins application. Approval usually comes within 24 to 48 hours.
