Only in a small handful of locations is Google’s dominance challenged to a meaningful extent, and of those such locations is South Korea.
According to Statista, it’s estimated that Naver handles more than 50% of all web searches in South Korean search market, with challenger Google following with a little over 30% of the market's share.
Do you want to expand your potential audience reach in South Korea and reach an audience of more than 40 million internet users where 30% use the internet between 21 and 35 hours per week (Statista, 2022)? Then you need to know these SEO best practices for your Naver search strategy.
Through this process, you can take measures to ensure that the content on your site is not omitted from Naver's search results, and above all, you can clearly inform the Naver search engine of the content you want.
Naver Search gives preference to search engine-friendly sites. Read this guide carefully and check if your site is optimized for search engines. Naver Search and Webmaster Tools will help you increase the number of visitors to your site.
Use the 10 optimization methods below to reflect your site content in Naver search
1. Register the site in Webmaster Tools and proceed with ownership verification.
Site registration is supported per host only.
http://www.mysite.com (O)
http://blog.mysite.com (O)
http://www.mysite.com/myid (X)
You can verify the ownership of the site by using the HTML meta tag or by uploading an HTML file. If you do not have permission to edit HTML or cannot upload files to the site, contact the site's technical staff.
2. If it is impossible to verify the ownership of the site, check the if you have one of the issues below.
Please check if the site's firewall blocks Naver Search Robot.
Support is not possible if the main page of the site is redirected using JavaScript or meta refresh technique. Please use the HTTP redirect method.
Support is not possible if you put HTML tags for ownership confirmation inside the frame tag. Write the HTML tag for ownership verification outside the frame tag.
Support is not possible if the original HTML file for upload provided when verifying ownership is damaged.
Webmaster Tools does not support Internet Explorer 11 or lower versions.
For a more detailed explanation, please refer to the Verify site ownership section of Naver Customer Center.
3. Allow Naver Search Robot to access the site
Set robots.txt as below to allow Naver search robot access to site documents. If it is difficult to change robots.txt directly, you need help from the technical person in charge of the site, such as the site builder or developer. See Setting up robots.txt for a detailed explanation of robots.txt .
(Example) Set access only to Naver search robot
User-agent: Yeti Allow: /
(Example) Set accessible to all search engine robots
User-agent: * Allow: /
Allow Naver Search Robot to access your web server or firewall. The name (User-Agent) of NAVER’s search robot is Yeti.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yeti/1.1; +http://naver.me/spd)
If you need to block a search robot inevitably, do not block based on IP. The search robot's IP range can be changed at any time. It is recommended to use robots.txt, which is a standard method, for access control of search robots. For information on how to check the IP range and name of Naver Search Robot, refer to the Search Robot Check Guide.
4. Check for duplicate content.
In some cases, multiple sites with the same content are opened to increase search exposure. Please note that in this case, you may be penalized for search exposure.
Don't use the same title for every page. The title of the page should be a phrase that accurately describes the topic of the content. See the HTML Markup Guide for details .
5. Submit your sitemap and RSS to Webmaster Tools.
A sitemap is a file in XML format that contains a list of URLs to be collected within a site. You can submit a sitemap in XML format from the "Request - Submit Sitemap" menu in Webmaster Tools.
Please include the latest articles on the site in the RSS feed, including the full text. You can do this by submitting your RSS feed from the "Request-RSS Submission" menu in Webmaster Tools.
For more information, see RSS and Sitemap Submission Guidelines.
6. Please tell us the channel related to the site.
A channel is a page for each social media account you run, such as Naver Blog, Cafe, Facebook, and Instagram. Please mark up the channel information you use for your online branding.
7. Check Naver search results.
Site content is reflected in searches within a maximum of one week after Naver's search robot visits. Enter the site name into the Naver search bar. Also, if you use the site: query in web document search, you can check whether the contents of a specific site are reflected in the search. ex) site:www.mysite.com
Use the content exposure and click report provided by Webmaster Tools to check how much your registered website has been exposed to and clicked on in Naver search results.
8. If the main page of the site is not exposed in search
Please double check your robots.txt and firewall settings to see if your site allows Naver search robot access.
If noindex is set in the meta tag of the main page, turn it off. Pages marked with noindex are excluded from search reflection. (As an exception, public property sites such as public institutions and educational institutions and sites with high user preference may be reflected in search according to internal policies.)
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Site titles and descriptions are strictly managed by search engines, so please refer to the HTML Markup Guide again to make sure there are no items that violate the policy.
Make sure that the information on the main page of your site is wrapped in HTML frame tags. Due to the problems caused by the frame tag, it is recommended to use regular HTML tags instead of the frame tag for important pages such as the main page of your site.
9. If the content of the site is not reflected in the search
If noindex is set in the meta tag of the page, turn it off. Pages marked with noindex are excluded from search reflection.
Make sure that all content within the page is loaded with JavaScript. Most search engines recommend using standard HTML markup to present your content.
Make sure you wrap all content within the page with HTML frame tags. It is recommended to use plain HTML tags instead of frame tags for important content on the page.
Make sure that the page is redirected using JavaScript when loading. It is recommended to use HTTP redirect or meta refresh in the head tag of HTML whenever possible.
10. If the number of documents within the site reflected in Naver search results is small, check the links within the page.
Please check if the sitemap and RSS submitted to Webmaster Tools are marked correctly. In particular, if links in the submitted sitemap and RSS are specified as relative paths, collection will not proceed if the host of the link does not match the registered site.
If nofollow is set in the meta tag of the page, please turn it off. For pages marked with nofollow, we do not collect links within the page.
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">
If only JavaScript is used when processing links to pages, there is a problem that the search robot cannot accurately identify which URL it is, so it cannot find other good information later. It is recommended to provide link URL information that meets the standard in order to inform Naver's search robot of the internal pages of your site.