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

Mitigating risk in search marketing, cleaning up link spam on your site, and getting your technical SEO foundation right with Liane Walker from Foodie Digital. \----- Welcome to episode 581 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Liane Walker from Foodie Digital. ## What's Actually Holding Your Food Blog Back in Search with Liane Walker from Foodie Digital Liane Walker 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 Liane 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. ## Three episode takeaways: - **Technical SEO comes first (and link spam is a bigger deal than most food bloggers realize)** — Liane sees link spam issues often in her SEO audits, and she's clear that it's a really common barrier to search success. She explains what link spam usually looks like for food bloggers, why Google's spam algorithm targets it, and the practical steps you can take to identify and clean it up on your site — including when to mark a link as nofollow. - **Once your technical foundation is solid, content strategy becomes the priority** — Liane explains that the real work is in your content strategy: organizing content in a way that signals meaning to search engines and structuring posts to serve both readers and algorithms. - **Reader-first and robot-first don't have to be in conflict** — One of the most practical takeaways from this episode is Liane's framework for balancing SEO best practices with genuinely useful, readable content. She walks through her tips for writing and formatting posts in a way that serves both audiences — and explains why, in a world of semantic search, these two goals are more aligned than ever. **Resources:** - Foodie Digital - Why Search Intent Matters for Food Bloggers with Liane Walker from Foodie Digital - Siftr - Google Search Central Link Spam Policies - A Couple Cooks - Pinch of Yum - Lily Ray's Algorythmic - Follow Liane on Instagram - Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group ## Thank you to our sponsors! This episode is sponsored by Yoast. Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [podcast@foodbloggerpro.com](mailto:podcast@foodbloggerpro.com). Learn more about joining the Food Blogger Pro community at foodbloggerpro.com/membership.