Olesia Korobka has stopped calling herself an SEO. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, the Ukrainian technical SEO behind Fajela tells Jeremy Rivera she now positions as an “SEO entrepreneur” — and that if SEO dies, she’ll be a marketing entrepreneur instead. The conversation ranges across knowledge graphs, what links actually mean now, why she thinks a large slice of the informational web is about to die, and the SEO charity feeding cats and dogs left behind by the war.
The blog-post retainer that will not die
Korobka splits her time between fractional roles at SaaS companies, her own agency, and a new venture. She is still approached by enterprises who want the same thing they wanted a decade ago: volume.
“I’m still approached by people from these big companies who want to do lots of blog posts about very generic topics with their corporate blogs, which has not been ranking for five years and will not be ranking for five more — but they still somehow are used to spending money on that.” — Olesia Korobka
The tell, she says, is what they ask about in the retainer: how many blog posts per month. Not who reviews them. “They are not offering any subject matter experts to review these blog posts.” What amuses her most in 2025 is that people still look at the blog as a traffic-producing machine. Jeremy’s version of the same complaint: nobody ever asks for a case study, a master class, a tutorial series — just “what’s our blog post topic and can you optimize it after it’s done?”
Many niches, one skeleton
Her portfolio runs from SaaS and startups through finance, insurance, iGaming, and local businesses like roofers. The biggest gear change she ever made wasn’t between industries — it was adding YouTube SEO to a practice built on technical SEO and knowledge graphs. But the more niches she works, she says, the more the differences look cosmetic.
In iGaming, “everyone steals from each other and they just reiterate the same old tune and it’s practically all spam,” so the game is almost purely acquisition of mentions. In highly technical B2B, the constraint is the opposite — there may only be a handful of places you can be published, plus Reddit, plus wherever the audience actually congregates, which is often one or two forums and YouTube. The underlying skeleton is the same everywhere: a technical layer that makes you crawlable and findable, a content layer, and third-party content that references you properly.
Links as references, not juice
Neither of them will call link building a dirty word, but both push back on scoring a link by a single number.
“I’m not against links in any case. I think that you need them. You need these mentions, you need these references.” — Olesia Korobka
Jeremy’s framing: a link that represents an interview you gave, on a channel with engaged listeners who actually flow through to you, is a different asset from something buried four layers deep that you hope Google crawls. Korobka’s addition is the knowledge-graph angle — for classic SEO a website is vital, but for brand building it isn’t strictly required. “You may have this knowledge panel in Google without any website, just by incorporating knowledge about you on the third party websites and in social media.”
The entity home, and the new crawlers that ignore your schema
Jeremy raises the entity-home playbook — an about page you control, stuffed with your history, founding, and key people, tied together with schema. Korobka has been running that method since learning it from Jason Barnard, and optimizes the about page (or sometimes just the home page) on every project. But she flags a shift: the new players don’t read your markup the way Google does.
“We now have new game players which don’t really use schema, like with the AI output. They use schema for organizing their own knowledge, but they don’t use the schema on your website.” — Olesia Korobka
She’s watching B2B startups appear with almost no consumer content who still need a site — not to attract an audience, but because investors and partners search for them. “Right now if you want to achieve something and you don’t have this home entity or something about you, you are less credible somehow. No one will treat you as a serious company” with only an Instagram profile.
Her summary of the whole tactic is deflating in the best way: “All the most powerful things are so basic actually when you look at them.” Say who you are, specifically. Jeremy’s audit experience backs it up — he has read about pages that describe a home cleaning company and a décor company equally well, because all they said was that they’re great at customer service and there when you need them.
The support-docs problem — and the swearing workaround
Both have watched organizations bury their own support. Jeremy has seen knowledge bases pushed three or four hops down because putting support up front “implies that they need support, and our tool is so intuitive.” His counterargument: once someone has signed up, the docs are the homepage, and “people are Googling, how do I do this with any software.”
Korobka adds a detail from a tool owner who answers his own support queue: people now open with profanity on purpose, because cursing gets the AI chatbot to hand you to a human faster. Jeremy notes the search-side mirror of the same behavior — Semrush’s Patrick Stox has reported that adding swear words to a Google query strips out ads and AI overviews, which is why brand-plus-profanity queries are turning up in Search Console.
Fortresses of mentions, and a web where you may not need a website
Her current build is a service that does link building without calling it that: “building their fortress of mentions and correct mentions and content on the third party side so that they can be recognized and they can be heard and they can be findable.” The bet is on brand search plus AI retrieval, and it takes all her time.
The second project follows from a genuinely uncomfortable prediction. If people shift to chatbots and personal assistants, the low-value informational web has no visitors left to serve.
“I’m not sure if we have that many websites in the future. I’m not sure if we need them at all. We have too much content which is not unique, and lots of spam which is not required if people start to use chatbots more.” — Olesia Korobka
So she is helping companies build condensed, distilled knowledge bases about their own industry and themselves — a single asset you can generate a website, a social profile, a blog post, a podcast, or a tutorial from. “Whatever happens to internet, whether we shift to web 3.0, whether we don’t, you can use this knowledge base.” Pushed further, she sketches a web where the LLM just calls your API: “maybe there will be another structure of the web where you have these API calls and you don’t really need to have a website. You just have a bucket with your information and various systems just connect to it.”
Jeremy is building the same thing from the other end — unifying years of podcast interviews into one queryable database so he can ask it for seven quotes from different practitioners on citations and pull them straight into an article. Korobka’s realistic caveat on who gets to redraw the web: “we don’t have the money for that, but only big tech companies do have, so it depends a lot on them… who controls this access to private information will win actually in the long run.”
SEO for Paws: the charity behind the episode
Korobka runs an SEO charity conference with Anton Shulke for animals displaced by the war in Ukraine. Small shelters take in cats and dogs abandoned by owners who fled — volunteers have broken down doors to get animals out of locked buildings — and those shelters have almost no funding. The conferences are online, the speakers include Googlers, and every pound raised goes to the shelters; neither organizer takes anything.
“They had this contract with a human that the human will care about them, but the humans abandoned them. So it’s good that there is Anton and other people who can continue doing the human part of the contract.” — Olesia Korobka
Her ask is not only money. “Even if you don’t want to donate, please come and just join us, because it helps to create visibility.” The math she has seen across charity work: one person shares, twenty more show up, one of those twenty donates or shares with twenty more. Jeremy’s suggestion — distill the three conferences into a downloadable book, the way Aaron Wall’s SEO Book once onboarded a generation and the way Aleyda Solis structured learningseo.io — and route the sales to the shelters. She’s planning exactly that after the third event.
Connect with Olesia
Olesia Korobka is at olesiakorobka.com and runs Fajela. She also publishes on YouTube and Instagram. Asked where to find her, her answer was on brand: “In Google, whatever pops up there for you, just use it. I have optimized myself a bit.” Anton Shulke, her co-organizer on the animal-shelter conferences, is on LinkedIn.
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this, explore the Unscripted SEO topical hubs or try the keyword-research tool at SEO Arcade.
