What’s Actually Holding Your Food Blog Back in Search with Liane Walker from Foodie Digital

Disclaimer: this transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back Liane Walker from Foodie Digital. Liane has seen just about every SEO mistake a food creator can make. In this episode, she’s sharing her expertise about the two things that matter most right now for food blogs, getting your technical SEO foundation right and creating content that’s structured to reach the right reader. One of the biggest issues Leanne has noticed time and time again with food bloggers is link spam, something that might seem harmless, but can quietly become an SEO success killer. She breaks down exactly what Google considers as spam, when to mark a link as no follow, and how this is all a part of mitigating risk in search marketing. We know you’ll get a lot out of this podcast episode, so without further ado, I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Liane, welcome back to the podcast.

Liane Walker: Hi, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: We were chatting a bunch before this. I had to cut us off. I said, okay, let’s hit record, so we can capture some of the things that we want to talk about here today. You’ve been on the podcast before. Yo work very closely with food creators, specifically food bloggers. This is a world that you understand really well. For those who aren’t familiar, give a quick preamble of what you do so people have the context going into the conversation and know that a lot of what we’re going to be talking about today is a lot of what you’re doing every single day. It’s the world that you’re living in.

Liane Walker: Yes. Okay. I’m Liane Walker, managing director of Foodie Digital and now also involved in Siftr, the newsletter, which is the SEO newsletter for food blogs. But my day-to-day is servicing Foodie Digital members together with the Foodie Digital team or a team of five. Most of us are based in the Vancouver area in British Columbia and Canada. We consider ourselves content strategists who are just really, really good at two different types of SEO, one being semantic search and then the other is Tech SEO. And what we’ll be talking about today, I would argue, kind of falls a little bit more into the Tech SEO camp. But we service more than a hundred food blogs on a day-to-day basis taking care of their plugin updates, WordPress version updates, obviously core at Vitals, but then we also work on their content strategies very closely with them. And there are some specific frameworks and stuff that we teach to.

Liane Walker: But what I always say is we can work to frameworks and concepts and some principles that are really core to the day-to-day work. But where the rubber really hits the road is when we apply them in your own individual scenario. And so that’s where you meet Foodie Digital members. No two audits we’ve ever done for any Foodie Digital member have turned out the same. So we work like that as if these sites are not the same because different tactics, different types of intent are going to move the needle for different content strategies. So that’s kind of us quickly in a nutshell.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Can you define real quick semantic search versus tech SEO? What are those two things defined? A prompt that I often use with ChatGPT is pretend I’m a fifth grader and explain semantic search and tech SEO.

Liane Walker: Okay. Yeah. If you Google semantic search, there’s going to be a whole bunch of kind of gnarly stuff that comes up and it’s a little bit intimidating. I often describe it to Foodie Digital members as there are lots of different types of search marketing. There’s e-comm SEO, there’s local SEO for a brick and mortar store on a local street. And then we practice semantic search. So if someone came to me and said, Leanne, can you optimize my Shopify store for me? I know you do some SEO. I’d be like, I don’t know where to begin. That’s not type of work that I do. It’s not my area of focus. So we practice semantic search, which is a branch of search marketing. It’s been widely recorded that Google is a semantic search engine or has evolved to become one. How I explain it to Foodie Digital members is our job is to help

Liane Walker: Foodie Digital members organize their content in a way that unlocks meaning. That can be organizing it from a category structure perspective, but that can also be organizing sentences. At the end of the day, Google is not an exact match search engine anymore. I think I’ve heard that even shared broadly on the podcast. So I think most people in food blogging have sort of moved back or moved past that kind of old school way of thinking about this work. And we’ve moved into having to focus on unlocking meaning. I always give this example on call too. I’ve tried many different examples of people over the years, but this is the one that drives it home that seems to have landed and I’m happy to share it here now. Food bloggers for years when they were writing, they’d write saute the carrots. What we actually want to do when we’re writing for natural language processing and to unlock meaning is write a sentence that looks more like when you saute the carrots and a skillet on the stove top over high heat, you’ll want to use olive oil and salt, yada, yada, yada.

Liane Walker: The presence of the words high heat stove top and skillet just gave meaning to the word saute. The robots haven’t been over for dinner. They don’t know what it means to saute anything. They’re like, does that mean air fry? It’s just a robot. Has no life experience, no perspective, no opinion. So we’re working in a way to unlock meaning because the algorithms, the robots today have evolved way past anything matchy-matchy. And our job is to make sure we write and structure content in a way that they can understand what we’re trying to get across so that they can then match our queries that we’re trying to rank for or show out for to the right reader who’s looking for them too.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit about how do you strike that balance? So reader first versus robot first. And so in that case, the framing is like, we need to shape it in this way because this will help them understand. But how do you balance that with being reader first in the content that you’re writing?

Liane Walker: Right. Always reader first. What is good for the reader is good for the robot. Full stop. We only ever coach you to write for your reader here at Foodie Digital. If you do that, you’re going to nail it naturally. I’ll often say, just write about your recipe like you’re sitting across the table from your very best friend talking about why you love it, why you developed it. That’s it. The algorithm understands when you start stringing words together, it’s picking up on the predictive patterns and starting to put together meaning. So if you stop writing actually with SEO in mind, you’re going to end up writing in a way that’s much more natural language processing friendly, which is ultimately what semantic search is.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And there was a time in the world of search where if you could more, this will always exist in some way, which is what we’re going to be talking about today with link spam, but there was a time where you could write content in a way where you were optimizing it for search and it worked because the processing from the bots that were coming to your site, reading your content was less capable than it is now. And I think one thing that’s helpful for me to think about is Google or any of these platforms really, but we’ll talk about Google. Google’s always trying to get better. How do we surface the thing that is going to be most helpful and realistically also earn Google money? And so they’re trying to balance those two things. They’re a for – profit company, they’re trying to figure out how to make money.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the best ways for them to make money is to surface the content that is the best match for what somebody is looking for. And along the way, if they can get people to click on ads, they are going to win as a company. And so looking specifically at just the search result piece, how do they surface content that is the best match or most helpful? 10 years ago, they probably weren’t, well, for sure they weren’t as capable at understanding language as they are now. And so my understanding when we talk about semantic search, it’s this idea of what do we feel like generally people are trying to get when they search this and how can we match the result with that? And there’s a lot of nuance around language. And what I hear you saying is what we need to do is we need to trust that if we write in a way that is going to be most helpful for the person who’s consuming the content, that at this point, a search engine like Google will also understand the intent of that writing.

Bjork Ostrom: We don’t need to stuff it full of keywords. We don’t need to write with a bot first. We don’t need to optimize for Google first, optimize for people first. But then there’s also this reality that there are best practices for how we structure content and how the layout looks on our site. And that’s where maybe more some of the technical considerations come through, which is like, hey, there’s actually things that you’d recommend, best practices, you want to have structured data. All of those things are important for bots as well. So talk about tech or the technical SEO consideration and why we need to be good at that when we’re also considering semantic search, writing for humans in a way that’s helpful, knowing that Google will surface the most helpful content, but then also making sure that it’s technically sound from an SEO perspective.

Liane Walker: And this is what we’re talking about today. The technical hiccups are barriers for visibility for sure. But these algorithms, in my opinion, have evolved to become much more content focused. So a few years ago, Foodie Digital members would come in the door and we’d audit their sites and their technical houses were a bit of a hot mess. Okay, great. That’s what we’re skilled at. We resolve a few things in collaboration with them and then boom, windfall of traffic. Ooh, nice win. Core of vitals improved. Okay. That does not happen anymore. I can’t tell you. I haven’t seen that happen in probably more than three years.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you say what your theory is on why that doesn’t happen? Because are people sound already coming in technically sound or the change in improvement doesn’t impact as much?

Liane Walker: I mean, I talk to food bloggers every day. They’re some of the most advanced search marketers I have ever been around. Sometimes I go to webinars with SEO people. I get invited to these things. I sit there and I’m being humble when I say this, but I kind of eye roll in some of those rooms. I’m like, listen, some of these members that we support at Foodie Digital, they’ve been doing this for three years. Why are these people talking about this as if it’s novel and new? Most food bloggers have had an audit done in their lifespan of their site, maybe more than one. Their tech house is generally pretty dialed. So when that’s the case, that’s the barrier to entry. Things are pretty good. Then what? When the technical side of the work becomes a little less like switch on, switch off to get things, then we have to be spending significantly more time on our content strategies.

Liane Walker: So what I know from experience is there are many Foodie Digital members now who will come in the door, will audit their site. Their technical house is practically perfect.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say technical house, that would be core web vitals, structured data, internal links.

Liane Walker: Yeah. Index. There’s nothing glaringly obvious that is a technical barrier to their content being discovered.

Bjork Ostrom: They’re not like no indexing their homepage.

Liane Walker: Exactly. But they’re losing traffic and they haven’t for a really long time. There are other members who come in the door and their technical houses are a little bit messy, but we can see in their content strategies they’ve been writing in a way that matches intent, prioritizes the reader, and they’re on the up and up. So I share that only because technical challenges can be a barrier, but really once they’re resolved, that’s like a one and done. And from our perspective, I will often

Bjork Ostrom: Say

Liane Walker: Digital members, your first 90 days has a bit of a fix-it mentality to it. And then after that, it’s all content all the time with us. And if we’re coming back to technical problems or challenges or barriers, we’ve dropped the ball.

Bjork Ostrom: Said differently, technical stuff should be generally a one-time fix that then is your core web vitals are good or your structured data is fixed up. You’re not needing to necessarily go back unless you push out a change and something happened. And so then the opportunity is around content moving forward and content strategy.

Liane Walker: Yes. And this is maybe a good segue to what we’re talking about today, which is link spam, because at Foodie Digital, we actually first 90 days fix it mentality and then we’d be focusing on content. And one of the aha moments I had a couple years ago is there was a new member who had joined us. She had been with us for maybe five or six months. And yes, we’d done all the technical auditing and historical traffic pattern audits and all the things that we do. But she was putting some of the things that we coach and teach into practice around semantic search, but her traffic was not growing. And other people around her had joined the community at the same time, they were growing. We were seeing pickups. And I was studying this one site and I’m like, what is up here? Why isn’t the needle moving for this individual?

Liane Walker: They’re actually based in New Zealand and her content was so good and she was working incredibly hard. And then I took this very long quiet drive. My children were not with me and I was driving for a two-hour period and I was just chewing on this problem. And I had this aha moment that I realized that maybe she had been swapping links with people. And the reason I share this is because what we’ve done at Foodie Digital is we used to wait until maybe a member had been with us for six months, eight months, nine months. And if we saw a plateau in their traffic, but they were working hard and putting the things we coach and teach into practice, then I’d start looking for Linkspam as a technical barrier. Now day one, Bjork, day one. We know it exists on every single site that we’ve ever audited at Foodie Digital.

Liane Walker: We’ve moved it so far up in our process that it has now become part of our onboarding audits. That’s how important I think it is. I think if Linkspam is on your site, it can be an SEO success killer. It really, really, really can. So

Liane Walker: Go ahead.

Bjork Ostrom: So let’s talk about Linkspam. Google Search Console has these great developer tools and articles that you can look through. We’ll link to the one around the spam policies section in Google Search Console. It’s Google Search Central, I think technically is the name of the kind of resource. And there’s a link spam section and there’s a lot of different things that they talk about as link spam. I’ll just rattle off a few. One would be buying or selling links. So I think we’ve all probably gotten the email from somebody who’s like, “Hey, love your content.” And you can tell us this generic like, “Dear sir/madam.” It’s like, “Okay, really love your most recent article that you published about, ” and then it’s just copy and paste of site title. “Would love to see if you work with other creators to link where we’d pay $100 or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: “Obviously what they’re trying to do is buy a link that goes against Google’s search policies. Interesting, it’s not like breaking the law. There’s no rules against it. If you had a site that you didn’t care about, you could probably do a lot of that and make some extra side money. But if Google discovers that, that’s going to be an issue. And so buying or selling links, if you’re going out and paying another site to put links on their site, that would be a violation of Google’s policies.

Bjork Ostrom: Using an automated process to get links somewhere. Back in the day, people would talk about, what do they call them? Blog networks, PBNs, where you’d have this internal linking scheme where you have these sites that are spun up and they’re all linking to each other. This one I thought was interesting. This idea of requiring a link as a part of your terms of service or a contract where you require a link to be included in a site. What you’re talking about specifically is this one here where it says excessive link exchanges. And then this is a bullet point on the spam policies link spam section in Google Search Central. So it says excessive link exchanges to me and all link to you or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking. Is that what we’re focusing on today?

Liane Walker: Exactly. I mean, I think I’ve looked at that policy enough that I think it’s in the top three, top

Bjork Ostrom: Three. Yeah, it’s number two. There’s buying or selling links as number one and it has three sub-bullet points underneath it. And then number two is excessive link exchanges. That’s

Liane Walker: Right. And I mean the buying and selling of links, again, most food blogers are pretty seasoned. They get those emails, they eye roll, they delete. But that excessive link exchange, it has morphed to take on so many different scenarios. And before we started recording, I said food bloggers are the biggest hustlers I’ve ever been around. They’re going to make it happen one way or another, which I applaud and love that hustle is needed in this work. But sometimes we’re hustling ourselves into a corner and we don’t even actually realize that that just happened. There are many different types of policies and frameworks that apply that food bloggers have to work within in order to have any visibility with Google’s platforms. This includes AI mode, AI overviews, and Google search. And it’s really tough to intimately know all of them. Most food bloggers are very aware that core updates roll through.

Liane Walker: We had one in March of this year and we just had another one in May. I’ve never heard anyone outside of us at Foodie Digital talk about the spam algorithm updates and what they mean and why they apply to food bloggers. I know that when we started having these conversations with our community members, they were like, “What? There’s another algorithm that I have to care about or be mindful of. ” And I think it’s just that the narrative has swung so much, those core updates, it hits the Facebook groups, dates and now it’s all the flurry of conversation. I wish that same behavior would actually happen with these spam algorithm updates. And that’s why I’m here today to hype them a little bit to be like, “Hey, if you’ve been working incredibly hard and your traffic has plateaued, or you look back at the last spam algorithm update and you kind of see that’s maybe where you had a little bit of a softening or even maybe a sharp downturn, that is your clue.

Liane Walker: We’re always looking to string clues together in SEO. That is your clue that you may have been negatively impacted by a spam algorithm update that rolled through that you didn’t even know about. So one of my personal goals is to make sure that the information that you need to know to be able to amplify your work successfully is in your hands. And I’ve been having these conversations inside the walls of Foodie Digital for years and I know it’s a really difficult concept to grasp. So that’s why I’m here today. I want to talk about a couple scenarios that I’ve seen real life and then also share with you a couple of case studies to bring the data behind this conversation because I think that’s really important. It’s not just about talking in frameworks and principles and concepts. It’s also about when the rubber hits the road, here’s the reality of spending time on the right thing, not just any old thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. A couple important takeaways. We talk about algorithm updates, these core algorithm updates to Google, ranking updates where things shift and these really big ones that people are talking about and sharing about, nor were you impacted by this? What you’re saying is that there’s other algorithms that exist. One of them is specifically around spam. Even I think back to Matt Kutz, who’s super early Google was the voice for Google for a long time. I think that was his job was spam team, but became this vocal voice for Google and Google search. And so obviously a really important piece of what Google’s trying to figure out is what is spam and how do we figure out what that is? Spam essentially being manipulation of people trying to manipulate things inorganically.

Liane Walker: It’s a pattern of abuse in order to manipulate the visibility

Liane Walker: Of what that could be a recipe. I mean, this also, to be clear, spam algorithm applies to travel sites and all these other genres of content. It’s not just specifically to recipes. We all fall under the umbrella, but it’s the pattern of abuse piece that I think gets away from us a little bit in the food blogging world. And we can talk about the various scenarios that I’ve seen, but it’s typically people bandwagoning a little bit together. They kind of rally, they get into a group and they start to do these excessive link exchanges using a spam policy language. And they actually think it’s helping when in fact it’s very likely hurting.

Bjork Ostrom: Was it at one point helping? Was there a season, because I think we were talking about this a little bit before we press record, but one of the things that we’re constantly trying to, we collectively, all of us as creators are trying to parse through is like, “Hey, there’s something that’s working and somebody said something is working and they can point to that. Maybe it’s working for a lot of people, but sometimes it seems like, oh, maybe this is actually a really cool thing that’s working and we need to lean into it because it’s a way that works to create content on social media and people respond to it. And so we need to observe and say, okay, do we shift and adjust? Because we’re constantly having to do that. If we weren’t, then we’d still all be creating articles that are talking about what we ate for lunch.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s like, okay, that worked 14 years ago, but we’ve had to evolve. In this case, was it working for a time and then Google caught up to it and now it’s hurting? Is that what happened? Or was it never really working and people thought it was? What did the story arc of these link exchanges look like?

Liane Walker: I mean, in my experience, the sites that have been around the longest who are Foodie Digital members, meaning they began in 2012 or 2013, they’re often the sites with the highest number of instances of link spam that are on their site because yeah, 10 years ago it wasn’t governed in the way that is now. And the simplest way I can explain why it matters now is the environment changed around the food blogger. The food blogger didn’t necessarily change. They were still executing on what they believe worked, but everything shifted around them. And of late, I think it’s really because AI tools have made it incredibly easy for people to produce content at scale. What I mean by that is they can create a thousand posts in two days leveraging whatever tool they have at their disposal. And one of the primary ways to have a new piece of content be discovered by Google, by search engine is by way of a link.

Liane Walker: So there’s a lot of swaperooski happening between those types of sites, which food bloggers are not nor do they see themselves as. But anytime there’s a little loophole in search marketing, folks love to run through it. They love to exploit it. It’s going to work for a minute.

Bjork Ostrom: Marketers ruin everything.

Liane Walker: The best way I can articulate what occurred is Google was like, nope. And it came through and they wanted to close the loophole down primarily for those bad actors, but then a couple really terrific food bloggers got

Bjork Ostrom: Caught. What you’re saying is there’s a bucket of creators who, especially now, or I don’t even know if you’d call them creators, it’s just people who are spinning up lots of pieces of content and then interlinking that either

Bjork Ostrom: With somebody else or probably more realistically creating seven different sites in a week with a thousand pieces of content interlinking those. And maybe you have some more established site that then links to those. But essentially it’s some scheme. And eventually what happens is because those have links that might get discovered. But Google says, “You know what? We don’t want to surface these bad pieces of content.” Like we said before, Google’s in the business of always trying to get the most helpful, interesting, engaging, authentic, sticky piece of content that they can. And so they’re like, “Okay, how can we shut this down?” In shutting that down, there’s probably some spam algorithm update that accounts for these link exchanges. But there are food creators who unknowingly were swept up in that even though maybe only 3% of their content is this kind of link exchange, they still get lumped in with a site that is being considered violating a spam policy because of this link exchange.

Bjork Ostrom: So how often do you see it as, hey, something that happened eight years ago, 10 years ago that somebody’s not aware of versus, oh, it’s still happening right now and people aren’t aware that it’s an issue?

Liane Walker: Yeah, all the time. Both scenarios. So I think some of the food bloggers that have been doing this for years and years, they’re busy. They have competing priorities all day long. So this is not where they’re spending their time any longer. But yes, six, seven, eight years ago, it was alive and well in their post libraries. There are also some very enterprising food bloggers who are just trying to get up over certain thresholds of traffic and they are looking to be creative. They’re looking to be cunning and they are getting themselves in groups. We were talking briefly before we started to record. I asked if you ever seen any of these spreadsheets, Bjork, where Sally, there’s 200 gals and some guys in this spreadsheet and Sally’s linking out to Sam. And then three days later, Sam’s supposed to link out to Lindsay. And then Lindsay’s supposed to link out to Izza and Izza’s meant to link out to our channel and just goes on and on and on and it’s this cadence and there could be hundreds of food blogs there and then it all cycles back to the top person.

Liane Walker: I mean, hopefully every food blogger listening right now is having a bit of a chuckle because I can almost guarantee you the majority of them have seen these sheets. Somebody may have chosen to participate, somebody may have not, but they’re alive and well. They are happening. So this is one of the reasons why I’m here to bring a little bit of awareness and just shine a little bit of a light on love the effort, love the hustle. Let’s put that into something else that’s actually going to meaningfully move the traffic needle for you because the environment that you are now trying to compete in algorithmically has shifted around you and we need some new strategies in order to be able to grow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So if Kind of the action steps, if you are doing it, stop doing it, number one, better places to focus on and it could actually be detrimental. With that is the idea that even if you think it’s this intricate linking scheme that you should always assume that Google’s going to be able to catch onto it?

Liane Walker: Okay. Yes. So if I can see it with my skills and my experience, we really started to double down and study link spam I guess about four years ago. If I can see it with my naked eye in three minutes, Google can see it instantly. So I mean, I know the markers, I know the things to look for now. As soon as I see someone has been plateaued for even three months, let’s say you come in the door, do a historical traffic pattern audit, we have a look, we’re like, oh, they’re in a plateau. My team members know, don’t even bring this to Leanne. Just export the list of external links and start studying it and show me the results because the first thing I will say is study link spam. I would like to share a couple of scenarios that I’ve seen because it is nuanced.

Liane Walker: It’s incredibly detailed and it’s very difficult to know what counts potentially as link spam versus what’s the safe zone. So first, talking about link spam, talking about spam is not sexy. Who bloggers want to be photographing beautiful recipes and promoting and doing all the fun things? I am deeply aware of that. So when I invite people to have this conversation with us, I try to make light of it and joke a little bit because it’s just as important as that title you write. It’s just not as sexy. So I’m here to kind of bring sexy back, I guess, to link spam.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, love

Liane Walker: It. A few things that I have seen and my team has also seen over the years is the most obvious and easy to find is two friends, maybe a trio, just trying to help each other out. It’s a little wink, wink, nudge nudge. Hey, I’ll link to you, you link to me, and you link to me. And it’s just a little swap and it’s truly done with great intention. You’re actually trying to help your friend out. It’s a violation of Google’s link spam policies to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: What part would it be a violation of?

Liane Walker: It’s the cahoots. We are in cahoots. We just swapped. We did it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And is the idea with that, I’m trying to think of we have creator friends that we are closer with or even people that we would use their content more. I’m trying to think of an example even. I can’t think of a great example for Pinch of Yum, but –

Liane Walker: Let me offer you one Bjork, because this is another scenario we’ve seen.

Liane Walker: So I remember in real time talking to a 3D digital member on Zoom that was a gal and her husband and she was telling me, we were talking about link spam and I was flagging all of these kind of patterns we had seen when we had exported the site’s external links. And I’m like, “Well, why are you linking out to this? ” And she’s like, “Well, actually we have a ghost writer. And I think maybe when we didn’t have a recipe, we didn’t have an avocado crema to go with our shrimp taco. That ghostwriter was linking out to their next client.” So they had their other person they were working for had an avocado crema and they though, “Oh, it’s so helpful. This client, I’m helping everybody. No, actually you’re creating a pattern of link spam because this ghostwriter went on and did it for 16 individual food blogs.

Liane Walker: The Fudu digital member didn’t know. They just saw that final draft and they were like, oh cool, you’re linking out to this person because we don’t have an avocado crema for our shrimp taco. That’s helpful for my reader. What they didn’t see is all the behind the scenes bits of

Bjork Ostrom: The strict – Where also that was happening. Yeah.

Liane Walker: You got

Bjork Ostrom: It. I’m just trying to think of if you have somebody that you’re friends with, and it’s not even in cahoots. The example that I think of is we’re friends with Alex and Sonya from a couple cooks. We’ve known them for 15 years and they’re the first internet connection food creators we’ve ever had. I don’t know if they have any links to us. I would assume we have some links to them, but all organic. We’ve never had a conversation where we’re like, you link to us and we link to you. I think that’s one of the hard things with it is I also wouldn’t want people to get to a point where they just don’t want to link to somebody because then if they link to you, then is it considered a link exchange? It’s beautiful.

Liane Walker: Spot on. It’s a fine line. The rule of thumb that I offer people is if they are in your contact list on your mobile device, that external link to them should be no follow. It’s as simple as that. No follow doesn’t mean what it used to mean five, six years ago. It’s just a little clue about, hey, this exchange of links is not organic. We know each other. Hey, heads up. The example I often give is if you’re doing an ad on Instagram, we don’t do social media, it could be digital, but if you’re doing an ad on Instagram, you have to disclose that. So it’s just a disclosure that the group at Pinchhip Yam knows the group at, did you say a couple of cooks?

Bjork Ostrom: A couple cooks, yeah.

Liane Walker: Yeah. So it’s just a disclosure. It’s not a, “Hey, we no longer link out. ” But if they’re in your contact list and there’s history there, there’s potential for perceived link spam. What we’re in the business of is mitigating risk in search marketing. We’re always trying to keep sites in the safe zone. So the rule of thumb is, again, if you know them, you meet them at a conference, if you could talk to them in person, the light bulb should go off. Hold up. The robot doesn’t know your nice people, Bjork. It doesn’t know you and Lindsay are cool with the couple at a couple of cooks. It’s just crawling links. So there’s no hall pass for you compared to another site. It’s just crawling the links and making a judgment call. And when the environment around you, again, has gotten maybe a little shadier because of the ability to produce content at scale using

Bjork Ostrom: It. At

Liane Walker: Scale.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Liane Walker: You have to adjust based on that. Not suggesting it’s going to be the thing, but it’s definitely potentially introducing unnecessary risk and a simple no follow to a friend, colleague, peer whose work you love, whose recipe you totally respect, who’s sharing that with your community, you know that they’d engage with it. Awesome. So it’s not a block to doing that. It’s just more consideration at the point when you are doing

Bjork Ostrom: That. So hypothetical on that, just to explore it a little bit more, let’s say somebody on the other side said, “Hey, we got some inspiration from somebody that we knew inspiration from Pinch of Yum for this and that was no follow.” I think I would as a creator go and look at that and be like, “Oh, shoot. That’s a bummer that there’s crediting of the recipe, but it’s no follow.”

Liane Walker: That’s right. So I’m here to boom, dispel that. Yes to recipe credit, yes to giving attribution, yes to sharing inspiration credit. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Actually, please do more of it food bloggers. Yes. But we have to stop being obsessive about this do follow link situation. It’s actually harming us more than helping us. Please learn that, just do a quick Google. The definition of no follow has dramatically changed in the last couple of years, but we’re hanging on to this kind of old way of thinking about it and I seriously think it’s holding us

Bjork Ostrom: Back. Can you talk about what the, maybe I’m holding onto some of the old way of interpreting it, what would be the new interpretation of a no follow?

Liane Walker: It’s really just a hint or a clue like, hey, either. I mean, there’s definitely several requirements where no follow needs to be applied. That can be if you’re going to earn a commission from an affiliate link. Absolutely. I think most people know that one. It can be manual. So sometimes gaps, things occur and things get missed. That’s fine. Not looking for perfection there, but I think most food bloggers are aware of that one. Number two is if you’re producing sponsored content, you’re linking out to that sponsor’s website, their products, et cetera. Yes, you’ve been paid. Money has changed hands.

Bjork Ostrom: Or like a REL sponsored. Yeah.

Liane Walker: You got it. And then the third scenario is just a clue in my opinion. Hey, just a heads-up, this is not an organic link exchange. We know each other and it’s no longer like a stop, don’t crawl. It’s no longer like, I don’t trust. It’s just a clue, hint, we know each other. This is not an organic relationship.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Got it. So how about what would you have a do follow link on? You wouldn’t actually add anything to it, it would just be a regular link.

Liane Walker: That’s a great question. Very little today. I think again, we are in the business of mitigating risks for hundreds of food blogs. So really I’m waiting for that answer as well. I think we are in a tough environment and we have to adjust and prepare our businesses to be able to thrive in the environment that we are in. You are in company with hundreds of other food blogs, thousands of other food blogs. Do you know what their behavior is like? Some good, some bad, some super shady. So you have to understand that you are swimming in the same soup as them or you’re swimming in the same pool of them and you have to mitigate risk to protect your own business and ensure that your own business can thrive.

Liane Walker: A lot of food bloggers will probably also know that one of the easiest ways to swap links is through Roundup posts. I think Roundup posts can be a really terrific way of showcasing content that you love from other people. But again, Food Bloggers are going to chuckle. I’ve seen those spreadsheets where everybody’s kind of getting organized. The second you’re organizing in that way, it is no longer genuine. It is no longer organic. It is no longer a vouch. It’s coordinated. And what are we trying to do? We’re trying to minimize patterns of abuse where manipulation is occurring for visibility.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Liane Walker: I would simply encourage food bloggers who want to be producing roundups that feature their peers and their colleagues’ content to make that no follow. And then have that conversation with your friend. Say, “Hey, listen, I did some research on no follow and actually the definition has changed and I might actually be doing you a favor here by featuring you and then setting your site and my site up for success by communicating that we’re not actually wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I’ll link to you, you link to me.

Bjork Ostrom: “ Yeah. That one feels like a super clear, easy no fall situation where you’re like, ”Hey, let’s do roundups. Let’s link to each other in these roundups.” It pretty clearly hits that bullet point number two here in the link spam list where it’s like excessive link exchanges link to me and all link to you or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking. It’s like, okay, that’s essentially the definition of what that line item is, which is we’re going to create these things and link to each other for the sake of linking to each other. And if you do, to your point, if you do want to continue doing those, hey, no follow that for sure. If that’s the way the relationship is established where it’s like there’s an agreement that you’re linking to each other. I’ll have to sit with the general no follow of most links.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m not convinced of that one yet, but maybe you’ll get me there.

Liane Walker: Can I

Bjork Ostrom: Just

Liane Walker: Sit really quickly on that, Bjork?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liane Walker: Big popular sites like Pinch and Bum get hall passes. They do. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. There are big volume sites in the Foodie Digital community who can get away with more than the up-and-comers can. So I think that’s worth saying here as well, that there are violations that we see occur. There may be a little warning shot sent, but some of those small medium sites that are working to hustle up, they are not going to be… The big brand piece can trump some of the trouble.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and maybe what I’m trying to understand is I’m in a situation where we are linking to another site or anybody else, Pinch of Yum or anybody else, let’s say, and there is no conversation or back and forth. There is no wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It’s just like us in our world linking to other people and places. I think it doesn’t seem like it checks any of these boxes of a link exchange and would therefore assume that you still would use a normal link in that situation. Here’s

Liane Walker: What I know from experience. Most food bloggers who are participating in active deliberate link swapping are that they’re doing it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes.

Liane Walker: That’s the message. So the good actors who are trying to… If you link out to Ina, it’s all good. You’re giving inspiration credit. Absolutely. I think we all wish we knew Ina, but we don’t. All good, no risk there.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. I think I see what you’re saying. Yeah.

Liane Walker: Yeah. The people who are participating, they know there’s a little gut instinct. They’re like, “I’m trying to do something

Bjork Ostrom: Here.”

Liane Walker: So I want to be clear. It’s a little nuanced and that’s why this conversation has to happen.

Liane Walker: When we work with Booty Digital Members to resolve instances of link spam on their site, we export every single external link on their site. We filter out Amazon links, affiliate links, et cetera, social, just to get a really nice data set. It’s like fine tooth comb. We are going through it line by… When I said link spam is not sexy, this is the part that is the least sexy of the whole thing. And there are many foody digital members that are, “Really? Is this worth my time?” I’m like, “This could not be more worth your time.”

Bjork Ostrom: Going through link by link to see.

Liane Walker: That’s right. And

Bjork Ostrom: In

Liane Walker: Fact, we have a reputation of being very thorough at Foodie Digital. We make Foodie Digital Members do that link export sometimes two, three, four times. Here’s why. The work is manual. Manual work is error prone. We are not all perfect. It’s not possible to get every single little instance when we’re looking at 600 external links. That’s a lot of your eyes start to go a little cross-eyed. So we sometimes will re-export and invite them to go back over the list. And again, sometimes people object and they push back. And I’m like, no, I do a lot of convincing. I really believe that I can see how hard you’re working. I can see it. There’s something, there’s a visibility barrier sitting on top of your site that’s holding you back. You could write the most perfect piece of content, match search intent. The photos could be beautiful.

Liane Walker: There could be no filler. The title could be excellent. And you’ve got this visibility barrier on top of you. I think it’s worth the time to just check.

Bjork Ostrom: To see if you might be lumped in with this spam filter that is around a link exchange.

Liane Walker: And one more thing, and I think this is a little bit more, this one’s tougher, is what we learned early on is bringing up link spam, folks took offense to that. Well, you think I’m being spammy? No, we think there’s instances of link spam that could be under the hood that you are unaware of. So it’s actually getting up over that hurdle of being like, it wasn’t deliberate. It wasn’t a temp. Sometimes it is, but you didn’t know. Just because you didn’t know doesn’t mean it wasn’t a misstep. Our job is to help you know and to help you mitigate that risk so that you can be successful going forward. And then again and again, Bjork, again and again, that visibility barrier lifts when we’ve worked with members to resolve link spam.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s almost like if this is considered spam and Google considers it spam, if you clean it up like structured data as an example, then you’re not being impacted by it as much. I think the thing that I want to be clear on or maybe just spend a little bit more time on is would your recommendation be like, “Hey, if you are linking out, generally do it as a no follow.” That’s what I hear you saying unless you really have no relationship with whoever it is that you’re linking to.

Liane Walker: Yeah, I think so right now.

Liane Walker: We have to adjust based on the environment that we are in and it’s weird out there, Bjork. It’s weird out there. And if we want to see the fruits of our labor and all the work and time and energy and effort that I think that this is worth a look. The Siftr newsletter has written about it and what was fascinating is the inbound links that came, meaning the inbound emails, excuse me, that came in after that issue were wild. And we ended up having the editors were forming this conversation and we ended up having a conversation with a reader who was like, “Hey, I actually totally think I did this and I just went and cleaned it up.” She knew exactly which posts it was in. She had done it years and years ago. She’d moved on to other things. She’d kind of forgotten about it.

Liane Walker: We kept the email conversation going with her for over a year now, and I think she was stuck at maybe 15,000 sessions and she just couldn’t break through. And the last time we talked to her, she was north of 80,000 sessions. And I want to be clear, she’s done a number of things well, but she really –

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. It’s not one thing.

Liane Walker: But she really feels like this was the thing that snapped that

Bjork Ostrom: Visibility

Liane Walker: Back into action.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And if nothing else, it’s just best practice. If you have an instance that you know you did this and it’s considered spam, it’s like, okay, clean that up. So that’s the next thing that I wanted to talk about. In those instances where you could look back and say, “Hey, eight years ago, five years ago, two months ago, I did this link exchange where I told this person, hi, I’ll link to you and you link to me. ” What’s the best way to clean that up? Is it just going back and deleting that content? Is it removing the links? No following the links? What would your recommendation be if people know that this is something they’ve done before to clean it up?

Liane Walker: Yes. Okay. So total judgment call at that post level. So you obviously have to read the content, see where the instances, the mention, et cetera, the external link lives. You have to look like, how did I write that in? What did I do? In a lot of cases, most Fudi Digital members will just remove the link. They just reword that sentence. They strike it. They’re like, “Actually, to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t adding any value anyways. I only added an external link because Yoast prompted me to include at least one. That’s the explanation for a lot of people. So again, it’s really genuine.

Liane Walker: They didn’t know what they didn’t know. So they will remove it. Now there are examples where someone will peek over the fence and be like, why’d you remove that? And so I always say, if it’s a little sensitive, just make it no follow. And then have that conversation with your peer and colleague who’s also trying to succeed and say, hey, the definition of no follow has changed. I’ve done a little bit of research around it and this is the choice that I’m making for my business in the environment that we are in. Those are the two scenarios that we have seen come up when people are working to clean it up.

Bjork Ostrom: And then how about in a situation where you don’t know if you have that? You talked about doing the list export. Obviously that only shows you the links one way. And then you also need to know if it’s coming the other way to know if you have these link exchanges. But even then it goes back a little bit to my point before, which is my guess is a lot of food creators are linking to each other organically and naturally because the world is only so big and you only have so many links. So how do you know if something would qualify as a link exchange versus just you by chance we link to the BuzzFeed probably somewhere. Buzzfeed links to Pinch of Yum. Is that considered a link exchange? No. We’ve never talked to them. So how do you know what’s a link exchange and what’s not?

Liane Walker: Okay, so BuzzFeed’s not in your contact list unless you’ve got PR on speed dial, they’re not in your contact list. So rule of thumb, are they in your phone? Sure. If they are, you got to be checking. So what I have done is I will export a list of external links. Usually even at Foodie Dish, there’s little duos and trios. There’s little friend groups that kind of roll around, love it. But as soon as a trio comes in the FoodieDish media, I’m like, oh, there’s going to be swaps there. We know it now. So we’ll know that Amanda linked out to Sarah and is friends with so – and-so. So I will just go to their onsite search and I’ll type in first name. I’ll type in the food blog name. Up it comes. There it is, swap, swap, swap, typically within about a week of each other.

Liane Walker: Bjork, I can find it now in five minutes or less.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So you’re going to that site and looking to see if they’ve linked back to the other site. So it’s kind of a manual process where you’re going through that, you’re looking –

Liane Walker: That’s a manual process I’m offering to the listener at Foodie Digital. Obviously we’re working in a more efficient way. We’ll export a site external links. We can also export non-foodie digital members external links, and then the swaps are pretty easy to see. I mean, it’s like a quick scan, scan, scan. You can see it. But for folks who don’t have access to those powerful link export tools, a lot of time it’s going to be your blogging bestie. And it was genuinely you trying to help each other out maybe with a little bit of a link. But once you actually read the spam policy and link spam guidelines, when you read it literally it says link to me and I will link to you. I mean, that’s what I’ve seen from experience.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And then so you go through the process, you clean this up. This would be an example of technical SEO in that you are examining links. It’s not necessarily content that you’re changing. It’s a structural consideration, cleaning it up on your side. My guess is you wouldn’t need them to clean anything up on the other side because once you remove one of the links, there’s not considered to be a link exchange there. It feels like reading the tea leaves a little bit. How do you know if what you’re doing is having an impact? Are there any things that you’re doing, annotations that you’re leaving and going and looking back on it? Or is it just like, “Hey, we know this is best practice, so we should generally consider doing this moving forward?

Liane Walker: It’s funny I said reading the tea leaves,” that’s my whole job. Foody digital dimmers know. I’m saying algorithm rolls through, start studying the data. All I’m doing is piecing together patterns, putting it into a pot and trying to read the tea leaves. There is no magic way to be successful in this work. I’m sure you and the team at Pinch of Yum know that. So it’s always a tea leaf exercise. Like I mentioned earlier, we used to audit for LinkSpan about the eight, nine month mark. We now do it on day one. So at Foodie Digital, because we’ve seen the fruits of the work with, and I can share some case studies in a moment, but because we’ve seen the success of it, we make everybody action that within their first 30 days here, which is quite a hilarious welcome to Foodie Digital in you go in deep woods into your links.

Liane Walker: But for us now, it’s a non-negotiable. I can’t say this enough times, every single Foodie Digital member that has come in the door has instances of known link spam known to us, not known to them.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. What would your definition of link spam be? They’re linking somebody and somebody’s linking them?

Liane Walker: Yep. Most often in food blogging it’s Leanne Walker, I’ll use my business partner, Carla’s name. Sure. Leanne Walker has her food blog. She links out to Carla and we kind of wink at each other because we know that that’s going to help one another out. Usually it is a one-to-one link swap.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Liane Walker: Sometimes we get trios. I mean, I have also seen really excessive ones, which are those kind of spreadsheet where there’s 200 individuals in there. Yes, we’ve seen those. That’s not wildly, wildly common among Foodie Digital members. Maybe 25% of the community have been in that kind of situation. Usually it’s the one-to-one swap or the trio.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Where you have some instance where whether it be a roundup that you each do and link to each other. And so the fix then is you go in, you remove those, maybe make an annotation or a note on your end, and then you continue on your way. Yo continue to do best practices around content creation. It’s kind of in this bucket of it sounds like what you’re saying is, “Okay, are core web vitals good? Great. Do you have strong internal linking? Okay, good. Have you cleaned up grammatical errors on your site? Okay, great. All of these core foundational things, do you have good navigation and do you have strong landing pages for categories? Once that stuff is all in place, have you cleaned up link spam, these best practices? Then you can go into the world of thinking about what we talked about before, which is this schematic search, thinking about content, thinking about content strategy.

Liane Walker: But today I’d like to pitch a slight different sequence of events. You could have perfectly written posts, great internal linking, you’re matching search intent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if you have instances of link spam on your site, in my experience, you will feel a visibility barrier. So remove the visibility barrier and the impact of writing great posts, great internal linking, matching search intent is going to be magnified because that black cloud isn’t sitting on top of your site. It’s a black cloud you can’t see. But I’m telling you from five years in now at Foodie Digital, I see it on day one.

Bjork Ostrom: That removing that has an impact, removing some of those internal links. Yeah. It’s interesting because you go into Google Search Console and they’ll give you insights on, “Hey, this was an issue with your site.” And it’s super helpful to be able to see from Google the issues that are present on your site, whether it be core web vitals or they have the HDTPS section where it’s making sure that all of your pages are secure. But there’s not really anything where anybody tells you if this is happening, which it feels like that’s a huge opportunity. I suppose the more data you have around it, the more that you can maybe try and skirt around it for people who are looking to gray hat, black hat type SEO. But it feels like it’d be super helpful to say, wait a minute, we’ve flagged this as link spam.

Bjork Ostrom: You should clean it up. Otherwise it feels like, again, you’re kind of like, is this helpful? Is it an issue? It kind of feels like –

Liane Walker: I’m here to say it is. Sure. And I think it’s Lily Ray, I believe. I want to make sure I cut it. I think it’s Lily. She said really great SEO starts after the checklist is done. And that’s what this is. Google’s job isn’t here. They’re not here to spoonfeed us. They make mistakes all the time, obviously, but they’re not here to spoonfeed us. They’re not here to make our jobs easier. I don’t know a single job where the person in charge is just paving the way for you and make no hiccups and just making it super smooth. I mean, that’s not how work works. The real magic of great search marketing comes in these great places. And that’s where we live at Foodie Digital, I think is where we excel. We are good with the checklist. But what I know today, Bjork, is all the food bloggers are good with the checklist.That checklist is done.

Liane Walker: The people who are coming

Bjork Ostrom: To

Liane Walker: Food Digital or signing up for the Siftr newsletter, they are looking for way more advanced, much more insightful. Telling them to have an internal link in their post. They are so far beyond that they are hungry for more. And in my experience, it’s the funkiness, the hard part Heart, it’s the unseen part and it’s living in this gray space. And I suggested talking about this on the podcast, I’m always trying to bring or shed light on situations that I see happen again and again and again and again. The one-off that we fixed for that one person that I’ve never seen again on any other site we’ve ever audited, great for that one member, but that’s a sample size of one.

Bjork Ostrom: I

Liane Walker: Don’t love sample sizes of one. I like patterns that a great SEO is able to really string together clue after clue after clue after clue, which can take many, many, many months in some cases years like has happened with link spam. And because I’ve seen it on every site we’ve ever audited, I think we need to be talking about it much more openly in food blogging.Because ultimately my goal, when I’ve seen these spreadsheets that these individuals are sharing, my goal is say, “Oh my gosh, I love that work ethic. I love that so much. Let’s bring that over here. Let’s put this on cutting the filler and matching intent and becoming obsessed with learning about personal intelligence and what it’s going to do. ”Because toiling over here in that kind of spot, you’re spinning your tires. And in fact, once you know, which is why we’re talking about it today, once, oh man, I know food bloggers.

Liane Walker: Once they know they do better for

Bjork Ostrom: Shares.

Liane Walker: And that’s why I think this is a really meaningful conversation to have because I haven’t really heard it be had. I’ve attended conferences and webinars, but I haven’t heard it be talked about openly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s great. And I think oftentimes what we find happens, you have this conversation, people talk about it, they share about it as best practice. I think to be able to introduce into this little community of food creators a filtering mechanism that keeps people from doing this moving forward is going to make the industry, the best practices, all of that better. And to your point, okay, great. You’re not going to spend your time grinding on creating a roundup post because you’ve signed up for this list to interlink with other people. Not only is that probably not going to give you a return, it might be a negative thing. So great to not do that again. And then where do you redirect your energy into something that is positive, helpful, that’s going to result in growth? It’s not playing a game so much as developing your craft and your expertise and helping people out, which I think the more that we can get people away from playing a game or even trying to manipulate a thing like we talked about before, the definition of spam, the more that you can get towards just genuine, helpful, impactful content creation, the better, which I think is a great result of a conversation like this.

Bjork Ostrom: So I know that you work with over a hundred food creators. You have Siftr, the newsletter, which would be a great thing for people to check out. If people are interested in either one of those, Foodie Digital or Siftr, what’s the best way to find out more to sign up and to follow along with what you’re doing?

Liane Walker: Okay. Well, Foodie Digital, I mean you can check us out at foodydigital.com. We don’t publish a ton of new information there only because we’re incredibly member-focused. Our wait list also remains closed at the moment, but it’s one of the reasons why when I was aproached, we decided to get working on Siftr. Siftr is operated by a different group other than Foodie Digital. Obviously we’re involved in the work that’s being created and the newsletters that are being produced. The people behind Siftr are also semantic search folks. So I would say in terms of what they publish, it’s pretty like – minded what we teach, the core approach we have at Foodie Digital. And you can sign up for the newsletter as a paid newsletter. And a lot of people sometimes are like, “Oh, why is it paid?” And it’s the idea that a lot… I mean, these are meaty, detailed, thorough newsletters.

Liane Walker: We introduced listening onto the newsletter maybe about a year ago now, just because we know people are in the movie, they’re doing dishes, they’re in the car, they’re taking it in these little snippets. But a lot of research, time, energy, effort, collaboration goes in the production of those newsletters, which is one of the primary reasons that it’s paid. It also allows us to steer clear of any sponsorship at the moment, which just allows us to be clear about following the data and being honest about what the numbers are saying, whether those are great stories or tougher conversations that we have to have and bring a little light to some of those like we’re having today. But you can just Google Siftr.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, S-I-F-T-R Siftr.

Liane Walker: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s right. Great. And then Foodie Digital as well. Liane, these are great conversations to have, I think important ones to have. I think it’s always refreshing. I’m sure for people listening, it’s refreshing too, to be able to talk about something that you haven’t heard a hundred times before. And I think that it’s a little bit like what you were saying where people have the basics down pat. It’s a super sharp industry where people are aware of best practices, implementing those best practices. And I think to have a new best practice to talk about is a really helpful thing. So appreciate you coming on, sharing your insights. I know that you see a lot of this in the data that you’re working with with content creators day-to-day, so super appreciate you coming on and we’ll have to have you on again sometime.

Liane Walker: Okay. Thanks so much, Bjork. It was a pleasure.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily again. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, it makes a huge difference if you could leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcast episodes and share the episode with your community. We know there are so many different podcast episodes you could listen to out there, and it means the world to us that you listen to ours. We hope you’ll join us again next week for our episode with Lydia Bagaroza from Visibility on Purpose. Lydia will be chatting about the importance of building authority through press, media citations in LLMs, and how to start reaching out to the press for apearances. It’s a super important topic. We hope you’ll tune in and in the meantime, have a wonderful week.