You may have noticed that your Pinterest descriptions associated with the particular images in posts are no longer being displayed on Pinterest. Instead, the descriptions set under the Social Media section are shown. Keep reading to learn why!

Pinterest has made some changes that have resulted in the Pinterest Description not being pulled. We aren’t able to say exactly why this happens since, from what we've been able to tell, Social Share is adding all the relevant data to the images on the sites.

However, Pinterest confirmed with us that their crawlers will pull from the OG Description metadata fields as opposed to the custom pin descriptions applied to each image.

It's possible the custom Pinterest description could be used, but that seems to only occur when there is no other relevant metadata for their crawler to pull from.

After conversations with Pinterest, we added the following disclaimer: “Pinterest has unofficially switched from custom descriptions to Open Graph metadata to pull descriptions. You can add the og:description using the Social Media Description field. The Custom Descriptions field will be visible to show historic values.”

What this disclaimer means is that instead of adding the description in the above field, you can instead add it to the Social Media Description text box, above the Pinterest section.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you update the descriptions via this method, Pinterest may not pull them right away if it has previously scrapped the site. It looks like there could be some caching on their side that holds the older data for a bit, so you may need to wait a bit before those descriptions update.