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

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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 Leanne Walker from Foodie Digital. Leanne 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 nofollow, 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 Björk take it away.

Leanne, welcome back to the podcast.

Hi, Björk.

We were chatting a bunch before this. I had to cut us off. I said, okay, let's hit record, uh, so we can capture some of the things that we want to talk about here today. Um, You've been on the podcast before. You work very closely with food creators, specifically food bloggers. This is a world that you understand really well. Uh, 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.

Yes. Okay. I'm Leanne Walker, managing director of Pootie Digital and, uh, now also involved in Siptr, the newsletter, which is the SEO newsletter for food blogs. Um, but my day-to-day is servicing Foodie Digital members together with the Foodie Digital team. We're a team of 5. Most of us are based kind of in the Vancouver area in British Columbia in Canada. We consider ourselves content strategists who are just really, really good at 2 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 100 food blogs on a day-to-day basis, taking care of their plugin updates, WordPress version updates, obviously Core Web 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 too. But what I always say is, you know, 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.

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 like, pretend I'm a 5th grader.

Yeah.

And explain semantic search and tech SEO.

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, you know, there are lots of different types of search marketing. There's ecom SEO, there's local SEO for like a brick-and-mortar store on a local street, and then we practice semantic search. So someone came to me and said, Leanne, can you optimize my Shopify store for me? I know you, you know, do some SEO. I'd be like, I have— I don't know where to begin. That's not the 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, it's It's been widely recorded that Google is a semantic search engine or has evolved to become one. Okay. How I explain it to Foodie Digital members is our job is to help Foodie Digital members organize their content in a way that unlocks meaning. Okay. 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 Cultu. I've tried many different examples with 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, sauté 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 sauté the carrots in a skillet on the stovetop over high heat, you'll want to use olive oil and salt, yada, yada, yada. Okay. The presence of the words high heat, stovetop, and skillet just gave meaning to the word sauté. The robots haven't been over for dinner. They don't know what it means to sauté 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, they 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 up for to the right reader who's looking for them too.

Can you talk a little bit about how do you strike that balance? So, um, reader first versus robot first. And so in that case, you know, kind of the framing is like, we need to shape it in this way because this will help them understand. But, uh, how do you balance that with like being reader first in the content that you're writing? 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 gonna 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, right? When you start stringing words together, it's picking up on the predictive patterns and starting to to kind of put together meaning. So, if you stop writing actually with SEO in mind, you're gonna end up writing in a way that's much more natural language processing friendly, which is ultimately what semantic search is.

Yeah. And there was a time in the world of search where if you were, you could more, this will always exist in some way, which is what we're gonna 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, uh, 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, like 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. Like, they're a for-profit company. They're trying to figure out how to make money. 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, uh, looking specifically at just the search result piece, how do they surface content that is the best match or most helpful? You know, 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 results 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. We don't need to stuff it full of keywords. We don't need to write with a, you know, bot first. Like 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. Um, all of those things are important for bots as well. So talk about tech and, 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.

And this is what we're talking about today. The, 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, okay, 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 vitals improved. Okay. That does not happen anymore. I can't tell you, I haven't seen that happen in probably more than 3 years.

Can you say, can you say what your theory is on why that doesn't happen? Because are people tech sound already coming in technically sound or like the change and improvement doesn't impact as much?

I mean, I talk to food bloggers every day. They are 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, I'm being humble when I say this, but I kind of eye-roll in some of those rooms because I'm like, listen, some of these members that we support at Goody Digital, they've been doing this for like 3 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, right, that's just, 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 strategy. So what I know from experience is there are many Foodie Digital members now who will come in the door, we'll audit their site, their technical house is practically perfect.

That, and when you say technical house, that would be Core Web Vitals, structured data, internal links. Yeah.

Indexing, like there's nothing like glaringly obvious that is a technical barrier to their content being discovered.

They don't, they're not like noindexing their homepage.

Exactly. But there's traffic and they have been 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, you know, 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 say to the 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. Sure.

Technical, uh, said differently, like technical stuff should be generally a one-time fix that then is your Core Web Vitals are good or your, um, you know, structured data is fixed up. You're not needing to necessarily go back unless you push out a change and something happened. Um, and so then the opportunity is around content moving forward and content strategy.

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, you know, first 90 days fix-it mentality, and then we'd be focusing on content. And one of the aha moments I had a couple of years ago is there was a new member who had joined us. She had been with us for maybe like 5 or 6 months. And yes, you know, 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, you know, who joined the community at the same time, they were growing. We were seeing pickups. And I was studying this one site and like, what is up here? Like, why isn't the needle moving for this individual? They're actually based in New Zealand. And I— her content was so good and she was working incredibly hard., and then I took this very long, quiet drive. My, my children were not with me and I was driving for like a 2-hour period and I was just like chewing on this, this problem. And I had this aha moment that, um, I realized that maybe she had been, um, like swapping, uh, links with people. And the reason I, I share this is because, um, what we've done at Foodie Digital is we used to wait until maybe a member had been with us for 6 months, 8 months, 9 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 link spam as a little, as a technical barrier. Now, day one, Björk, day one, we know it exists on every single site that we've ever audited at Foodie Digital. 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 link spam is on your site, it can be an SEO success killer. It really, really, really can. So go ahead.

So let's, let's talk about link spam. Um, you know, Google Search Console has these great developer tools and articles that you can look through. Um, we'll link to the one around the spam policies section in Google Search Console. Uh, 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 like 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 it's this generic, like, dear sir slash madam, like, it's like, okay, like, Really love your most recent article that you published about, and then it's just like copy and paste of site title. Would love to see if you work with other creators to link, you know, where we'd pay $100 or whatever. Obviously what they're trying to do is like buy a link that goes against Google's search policies. Interesting. It's not, it's not like breaking the law. There's no like 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, like if you're going out and paying another site to put links on their site, that would be a violation of Google's policies. You know, 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 like 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, like this idea of having a— requiring a link as a part of your terms of service or a contract where you, you know, 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 in— this is a bullet point on the Spam Policies link spam section in Google Search Central. And it's— so it says excessive link exchanges, parentheses, quote, link to me and I'll link to you, or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking. Is that what we're focusing on today?

Exactly. I mean, I think I've looked at that policy enough that I think it's like in the top 3.

Yeah, it's number 2. Yeah, there's like buying or selling links as number 1, and it has 3 sub-bullet points underneath it. And then number 2 is excessive link exchanges.

That's right. And I mean, the buying and selling of links, again, most food bloggers 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. Um, and before we started recording, I said food bloggers are the biggest hustlers I've ever been around. Um, they're going to make it happen one way or another, which I applaud and love that hustle is needed in this work, but it's 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, you know, frameworks that apply that food bloggers have to work within in order to be— 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. We just, you know, 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 food bloggers— 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, you know, be mindful of. And I think it's just that the narrative has swung so much. Those core updates, it hits the Facebook groups, it's announced, it starts, you know, 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 kind of like 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. 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 my, you know, one of my, you know, 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 FoodieDigital 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 in real life, and then also share with you a couple of case studies to kind of bring the data behind this conversation, because I think that's really important. It's not just about You know, talking in frameworks and principles and concepts. It's also about like when the rubber hits the road, here's the reality of spending time on the right thing, not just any old thing.

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 like the, these really big ones that, you know, 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 Cutts, who was like super early Google, kind of was the voice for Google for a long time. I think he was like, that was his job was like spam team, uh, but like kind of became this vocal, uh, kind of, uh, voice for Google and Google Search. And so, um, 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 like manipulation of people trying to manipulate things inorganically.

It's a pattern of abuse in order to manipulate the visibility of what that could be a recipe. I mean, this also, to be clear, you know, 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, in the food blogging world. And we can talk about, you know, 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 the spam policy language, and they actually think it's helping. When in fact it's very likely hurting.

What was it at one point helping? Like, is there, was there a season? Cause I think, you know, 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, 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, this, maybe this is actually a really cool thing that's working and we need to lean into it because it's a way that, uh, works to create content on social media and people respond to it. And so like, we need to observe and say like, okay, do we shift and adjust? Because we're constantly having to do that. You know, if we weren't, then we'd still all be creating articles that are talking about like what we ate for lunch. And it's like, okay, that worked 14 years ago, but like we've had to evolve. In this case, you know, was it working for a time and then Google caught up to it and now it's, now it's like hurting? Is that what happened? Or was it never really working and people thought it was? What, what did the like story arc of these link exchanges look like?

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, they, you know, 10 years ago it wasn't governed in the way that it 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 You know, AI tools have made it incredibly easy for people to produce content at scale. What I mean by that is, you know, they can create 1,000 posts in 2 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, you know, search engine, is by way of a link. 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, right? They love to exploit it. It's going to work for a minute.

Marketers ruin everything.

The best way I can sort of 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 kind of got 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 'em creators. It's just like people who are spinning up lots of pieces of content and then interlinking that either with somebody else or probably more realistically creating 7 different sites in a week with 1,000 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. Um, like we said before, Google's in the business of always trying to get the most helpful, interesting, engaging, you know, authentic, sticky piece of content that they can. Um, 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.

Yeah.

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, or, or, you know, violating a spam policy because of this link exchange. So how often do you see it as, hey, something that happened 8 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.

Yeah. Um, all the time, both, both scenarios. So, um, I think some of the food bloggers that have been doing this for years and years, they're busy. They, they have competing priorities all day long. So they're not, this is not like, uh, where they're spending their time any longer. But yes. 6, 7, 8 years ago, it was alive and well in their post libraries. There are also some very enterprising food bloggers who are trying to get up over certain thresholds for, you know, of traffic. And they are looking to be creative. They're looking to be cunning and they are getting themselves in groups. You know, we were talking briefly before we started to record. I asked, have you ever seen any of these spreadsheets, Björk, where, you know, Sally, you know, there's 200 gals and some guys in this spreadsheet. And, you know, Sally's linking out to Sam, and then 3 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 Archana, and it 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. 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.

Yeah. So, uh, if kind of the action steps, if you are doing it, stop doing it, number one, uh, better places to focus on, and it could actually be detrimental. With that is the idea that like, 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. Okay.

Yes.

So I, if I can see it with my skills and my experience, we really started to double down and study links spam, I guess about 4 years ago. If I can see it with my naked eye in 3 minutes, Google can see it instantly. So, I mean, I, I know the markers, I know the things to look for now. As soon as I see someone has been plateaued for, for even 3 months, let's say you come in the door, we 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 like 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, um, it is nuanced. It's incredibly detailed and it's very difficult to know what counts potentially as link spam versus what's the safe zone. So, um, first, talking about link spam, talking about spam is not sexy. Food 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, like, I try to make light of it and like 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.

Yeah, love 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.

What part would it be a violation of?

That it's the cahoots. We are in cahoots. We just swapped. We did it.

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

Well, I think, let me offer you one, Björn, 'cause this is another scenario we've seen.

Yeah.

So, I remember real time talking to a Fruity Digital member on Zoom. It was a gal and her husband, and she was telling me, we were talking about link spam, and I was like 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, you know, this? And she's like, well, actually we have a ghostwriter And I think maybe when we didn't have a recipe, you know, 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 thought, 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.

Sure.

The Foodie 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.

Yep.

What they didn't see is all the behind the scenes bits of the stringing.

Where also that was happening.

Yeah.

You got it.

I'm just trying to think of like, if you have somebody that you're friends with and it's not even like in cahoots, like I, the example that I think of is like, we're friends with Alex and Sonia from A Couple Cooks. We've known them for 15 years and they're like the first internet connection, uh, food creators we've ever had. I don't know what their, if they have any links to us. I, I, I would assume we have some links to them. Uh, but like all organic, we've never had a conversation where we're like, you link to us and we link to you. Um, I think that's one of the hard things with it is like, 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?

Like, uh, spot on. It's a fine line. The way, 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 nofollow. It's as simple as that, right? Nofollow doesn't mean what it used to mean 5, 6 years ago. It's just a little clue about like, hey, this, this exchange of links is not organic. We know each other. Like, hey, heads up. I, uh, the example I often give is like, if you're doing an ad on Instagram, we don't do social media at Goody Digital, but if you're doing an ad on Instagram, you have to disclose that. So it's just a disclosure that, you know, uh, that the group at Pinch of Yum knows the group at, um, did you say A Couple of Cooks?

Uh, A Couple of Cooks, yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's just a disclosure. It's not a, hey, no, 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, right, 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 you're nice people, Björk. It doesn't know you and Lindsay are cool with the couple at A Couple Cooks, right? 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 ChatFBP, then you have to adjust based on that. Not suggesting it's gonna be the thing, but, um, it's definitely perhaps potentially introducing unnecessary risk and a simple nofollow 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, to, to doing that. It's just more consideration at the point when you are doing that.

So hypothetical in 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 nofollow. I think I would, as a creator, go and look at that and be like, oh, shoot. Like, that's a bummer that there's like crediting of the recipe, but it's nofollow.

That's right. So I'm here to boom, dispel that, right? 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. Um, yes, but we have to stop being obsessive about this dofollow link situation. It's actually harming us more than helping us. Please learn that. Just do a quick Google. The definition of nofollow 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 back.

What 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 nofollow?

It's really just a hint or a clue like, hey, either, I mean, there's, there's definitely several requirements where nofollow 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 2 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.

Or like a rel sponsored.

Yeah, you got it. Um, 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.

Sure. Got it. So how about what would you have a dofollow link on? You know, you wouldn't actually add anything to it. It would just be a regular link.

That's a great question. Um, very little today. Uh, you know, I think again, we are in the business of mitigating risks for hundreds of food blogs. So I really am, 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 know, you're swimming in the same pool as them and you have to mitigate risk to protect your own business and ensure that your own business can thrive. Um, you know, uh, 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, Uh, who bloggers are gonna chuckle. I've seen those spreadsheets, right? 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, 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. Yeah. So I would simply encourage who bloggers who wanna be producing roundups that feature their peers and their colleagues' content to make that nofollow. And then have that conversation with your friend. Say, hey, listen, I did some research on nofollow and actually the definition has changed and I might actually be doing you a favor here, right? By featuring you and then setting your site and my site up for success by communicating that we're not actually, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, I'll link to you, you link to me.

Yeah. That one feels like a super clear, uh, easy, like like nofollow situation where you're like, hey, let's do roundups. Let's link to each other in these roundups. It's like, it pretty clearly hits that like, uh, bullet point number 2 here in the link spam list where it's like excessive link exchanges, link to me and I'll link to you, or partner pages exclusively, exclusively for the sake of cross-linking. It's like, okay, that's essentially the definition of what that one, that line item is, which is like, um, You know, we're gonna 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, like, hey, nofollow 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 like general nofollow of most links. I'm not convinced of that one yet, but maybe you'll get me there.

Can I just say something? Really quickly on that, Björk. Yeah. Big popular sites like Pinch of Yum get hall passes. They do. I've seen it with my own eyes. They're, you know, 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, right? That there are violations that we see occur that, you know, there may be little warning shots sent, but some of those small, medium sites that are working to hustle up, they are not going to be you know, the big brand piece can trump some of the trouble.

Well, I, and maybe, maybe what I'm trying to understand is I'm in a situation where we are like 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 that would, 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 what I know from experience. Most food bloggers who are participating in active, deliberate link swapping are aware that they are doing it. So that's the message. So, you know, the good actors who are trying to like, you know, if you link out to Ina, you know, it's all good. Like you're giving inspiration credit. Like, absolutely. I think we all wish we knew Ina, but we don't. All good. No risk there.

But the— okay. I think I see what you're saying.

Yeah. Yeah. The people who are participating, they know there's a little gut instinct. Yeah. They're like, hmm, I'm trying to do something here. Yeah. Right. So that's, I want to be clear. It's a little nuanced and that's why this conversation has to happen. Yeah. 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 kind of get like a really nice dataset. And we are going, it's like fine-tooth comb. We are going through it line by line. 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 Foodie Digital members that are really, is this worth my time? I'm like, this could not be more worth your time.

Going through link by link to see.

That's right. And in fact, um, we have a reputation of being very thorough at Foodie Digital. I, we make Foodie Digital members do that link export sometimes 2, 3, 4 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, right? So we really— 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. You know, 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, um, 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 to see if you might be lumped in with this, like, spam filter that is like around a link exchange.

And one more thing, and I think this is a little bit more— this one's tougher— is whenever we, you know, 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 No, sometimes it is, but you know, 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 again and again, Björk, again and again, that visibility barrier lifts when we've worked with members to resolve link spam.

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, that I want to be clear on, or maybe just spend a little bit more time on, is like, would your recommendation be like, hey, if you are linking out, generally do it as a nofollow? That's what I hear you saying, unless you you really have no relationship with whoever it is that you're linking to.

Yeah, I think so right now. Sure. We have to adjust based on the environment that we are in and it's weird out there, Björk. It's weird out there. And if, you know, 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, this is worth a look. We've, you know, the Sifter 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, you know, the editors were informing 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. It just, you know, she'd moved on to other things. She'd kind of forgotten about it. 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 it, make breakthrough. And the last time we talked to her, she was north of 80,000 sessions. And she, I want to be clear, like, uh, she's done a number of things well, but she really—

yeah, right.

It's not one thing, but she, she really feels like this was kind of the thing that snapped that visibility back into action. Yeah.

And if nothing else, it's just best practice. Like 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 know, you could look back and say like, hey, uh, 8 years ago, 5 years ago, 2 months ago, I did this like link exchange where I told this person, I'll link to you and you link to me. What's the best way to clean that up? Is it like 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?

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? Like, what did I do? In a lot of cases, you can quite— most Foodie 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. It's not a, you know, they really, what they, they didn't know what they didn't know. So they will remove it. Now there are examples where, you know, someone will peek over the fence and be like, why'd you remove that? And I, so I always say, if it's a little sensitive, just, you know, make it nofollow and then have that conversation with your peer and colleague who's also trying to succeed and say, hey, the definition of nofollow has changed. I've done a little bit of research around it and this is, you know, the choice that I'm making for my business in the environment that we are in. Those are kind of the two scenarios that we have seen come up when people are working to clean it up.

And then how about in the situation where you don't know if have that? Like 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 like, my guess is a lot of food creators are linking to each other organically and naturally because, you know, it's the world is only so big and you only have so many links. So how do you know if something would qualify as like a link exchange? Versus just you by chance, we link to the BuzzFeed probably somewhere. BuzzFeed links to Pinch of Yum. Uh, is that considered a link exchange? No, like we've never talked to them. Uh, so how do you know what's a link exchange and what's not?

Okay. So BuzzFeed's not in your contact list, right? Unless you've got, you know, PR on speed dial, they are not in your contact list. So rule of thumb, are they in your phone? Sure. If they are, you gotta be checking. So, um, what I have done is I will export a, a list of external links. Usually, uh, even at Pooty Dish, there's little duos and trios. There's like little friend groups that kind of roll around. Love it. But as soon as a trio comes in the Pooty Dish community, I'm like, oh, there's gonna be swaps there. We know it now. So, you know, we'll know that Amanda linked out to Sarah or is, and is friends with so-and-so. Okay. So I will just go to their on-site 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. I mean, it's— Björk, I can find it now in 5 minutes or less.

Sure. So you're going to that site, uh, and looking to see if they've linked to, uh, back to the other site. So it's kind of a manual process where you're going through that. You're looking.

That's a manual process I'm offering to the listener. At Fruity Digital, obviously we're working in a more efficient way. We'll export, as I said, external links. We can also export non-Fruity Digital members' external links, and then the swaps are pretty easy to see. I mean, just like, it's like a quick scan, scan, scan, you can see it. But, you know, for folks who don't have access to those powerful link export tools. A lot of time it's gonna be your, your blogging bestie, and it was genuinely you trying to help each other out, maybe with a little bit of a wink. Um, 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. Sure.

And then, so you go through the process, you clean this up. Um, this would be an example of like, technical SEO, uh, in that you are examining links. It's not necessarily content that you're changing. It's a structural consideration, uh, cleaning it up on your site. 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. Um, how do you know? It feels, um, like reading the tea leaves a little bit. How do you know if what you're doing is having an impact? Uh, are there any things that you're doing, you know, 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?

It's funny you said reading the tea leaves. That's my whole job. Foodie digital nomads know what I'm saying. Like, algorithm rolls through, we start studying the data. All I'm doing is piecing together patterns, putting 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 know, you and the team at Pinch of Yum know that. So it's always a tea leaf exercise. We, like I mentioned earlier, we used to audit for link span about the 8, 9-month mark. We now do it on day 1. So at Foodie Digital, because we've seen the fruits of the work with, you know, 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, like, welcome to Foodie Digital, in you go, in deep woods into your, into your links. Um, and, uh, but for us now it's a non-negotiable. Every— 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. Sure.

Like they've, uh, what would your definition of link spammy. They're linking to somebody and somebody's linking to them.

Yeah, it's, it's a, most often in food blogging, it's a, you know, Leanne Walker, I'll use my business partner Carla's name. Sure. You know, Leanne Walker has her food blog. She links out to Carla. Um, and, uh, we kind of wink at each other cuz we know that that's gonna help one another out. Um, usually it is a one-to-one link swap.

Sure.

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

Yeah, that makes sense. Where you have some instance where, whether it be a roundup that you each do and link to each other. Um, and so the fix then is you go in, you remove those, Maybe make an annotation or a note on your end, and then it's, you continue on your way. Uh, you continue to do best practices around content creation. It's kind of in this bucket of like, it sounds like what you're saying is, okay, are Core Web Vitals good? Great. Do you have strong internal linking? Okay, good. Like, uh, do you have, uh, have you cleaned up like grammatical errors on your site? Okay, great. Like all of these. Core foundational things. Do you have good navigation and do you have strong, you know, landing pages for categories? Once that stuff is all in place, have you cleaned up link spam, kind of these best practices, then you can go into the world of thinking about what we talked about before, which is this kind of semantic, uh, schematic, uh, search, thinking about content, thinking about content strategy.

But today I'd like to kind of pitch a slight different sequence of events. Like 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, you, 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, you know, 5 years in now at Foodie Digital, I see it on day 1.

That removing that has an impact, removing some of those internal links. Yeah. It's interesting 'cause it's not, it's, you know, you go into Google Search Console and they'll give you like insights on like, hey, this was an issue with your site. And it's super helpful to be able to see from Google, like the issues that are present on your site. Um, you know, whether it be Core Web Vitals or, you know, they have the HTTPS section where it's like making sure that all your pages are secure. Um, 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. Um, for people who are looking to kind of like gray hat, black hat type SEO, but it feels like it'd be super helpful to say like, wait a minute, we've flagged this as link spam. You should clean it up. Otherwise it feels like, again, you're kind of like, is this helpful? Is it an issue?

Uh, it, it's, um, it kind of feels like I'm here to say it is right. And I think it's, it's Lily Ray, I believe, if I'm gonna— I want to make sure I credit. I think it's Lily. Um, she said, you know, really great SEO starts after the checklist is done. And that's what this is, right? Um, Google's job isn't here, you know, they're not here to like spoon-feed us. You know, they make mistakes all the time, obviously, but they're not here to spoon-feed us. They're not here to make jobs easier. I don't know a single job where, you know, the person in charge is just, you know, paving the way for you and make no hiccups and just making it super smooth. I mean, that's not, that's not how work works. The real magic of great search marketing comes in these gray places. And that's where we live at Foodie Digital. I think it's where we excel. We are good with the checklist, but what I know today, Björk, is all the food bloggers are good with a checklist. Like, that checklist is done. The people who are coming to Food Visual or signing up for the Sifter newsletter, like, they are looking for way more advanced, much more insightful, you know, telling them to, you know, have an internal link in their post. Like, they are so far beyond that. They are hungry for more. And in my experience, it's the funkiness, the hard part, it's the unseen part, and it's living in this gray space. And, you know, and I suggested, you know, talking this on the podcast, um, I'm always trying to bring or shed light on situations that I see happen again and again and again and again. Like the one-off that we fixed for that one person that I've never seen again on any other site we've ever audited. Like, great for that one member, but that's a sample size of one. I don't love sample sizes of one. I like patterns, right? 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, you know, when I've seen these spreadsheets that these individuals are sharing, my goal is to say, oh my gosh, I love that work ethic. Like, I love that so much. Let's bring that over here. This on, you know, cutting the filler and matching intent, 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, you're spinning your tires. And in fact, you know, once you know, which is why we're talking about it today, once— oh man, I know food bloggers, once they know, they do better, like for sure. 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, you know, webinars, but I haven't heard it be talked about openly.

Like, yeah, it's great. And I think that, 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. Um, and to your point, okay, great. You're not gonna spend your time grinding on creating a roundup post because you've signed up for this list to like interlink with other people. Uh, not only is that probably not gonna give you a return, it might be a negative thing. So great to not do that again. Uh, and then where do you redirect your energy? Into something that is positive, helpful, that's gonna result in growth. You know, it's not playing a game so much as like 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 like trying to manipulate a thing like we talked about before, like the definition of spam, like the more that you can get towards just like genuine helpful impactful content creation, the better, which I think is a great result of a conversation like this. So I know that you work with like over 100 food creators. You have Sifter, 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 Sifter, what's the best way to find out more, to sign up and yeah, to follow along with what you're doing?

Okay. Well, Foodie Digital, I mean, you can check us out at foodiedigital.com. We We don't publish a ton of new information there only because we're incredibly member-focused. Our waitlist also remains closed at the moment, but it's one of the reasons why, you know, when I was approached, we decided to get working on Sifter. Sifter 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 Sift are also semantic search folks, so I would say in terms of what they publish, it's pretty like-minded to what we teach, the kind of core approach we have at Foodie Digital. And you know, you can sign up for the newsletter. It's a paid newsletter, and a lot of people sometimes are like, oh, you know, why is it paid? And it's the idea that, you know, a lot— I mean, these are meaty, detailed, thorough newsletters. We introduced listening onto the newsletter, you know, maybe about a year ago now, just because we You know, people are on the move, they're doing dishes, they're in the car, they kind of, they're taking it in in these little snippets. But a lot of research, time, energy, effort, collaboration goes in the production of those newsletters, which is, you know, one of the primary reasons that it's paid. It also allows us to kind of 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, you know, those are, you know, great stories or, you know, tougher conversations that we have to have and bring a little light to some like we're having today. But you know, you can just Google SIFTTR.

Yeah, S-I-F-T-R, SIFTTR.

That's right.

Great.

And then Foodie Digital as well. Leanne, these are great conversations to have. I think important ones to have. 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 100 times before. And I think that it's a little bit like what you were saying where people have the basics down pat. Yeah. Like 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, uh, appreciate you coming on, sharing your insights. Uh, 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.

Okay. Thanks so much, Bjørn. It was a pleasure.

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 Bagarozza 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 appearances. It's a super important topic. We hope you'll tune in, and in the meantime, have a wonderful week.