Before the end of the year, 2 key updates were made on Naver that are noteworthy from an SEO standpoint.
Naver announced in November that website submission services will be discontinued from December 2015. As a result, websites now need to be submitted through the Naver Webmaster Tool. In addition to this update, Naver provided a new set of SEO guidelines.
In this article, we will take a look at each of these updates.
Update 1: Website submission and search visibility
Prior to this update, websites had to be manually submitted to appear in search results through the “Site Submission” link found in the sites section of Naver’s search result pages. An example of the link is highlighted below:
With the recent update, a new website can be submitted using the Naver Webmaster Tool, and the website will automatically be submitted for visibility on the Naver search engine. A separate request for search visibility is therefore not required.
It is also not required to manually submit your website information (name, description, etc.). Naver bot will crawl and index the relevant information for you.
As shown in the screen capture of the Naver Webmaster Tool below, the tool highlights key SEO elements (site name, description, robots.txt) and your website’s status on each of them.
Update 2: New Naver SEO Guidelines
Naver stated that websites complying with web standards and preferred by users will be ranked for search results. Information such as site name, description, etc. that are required for visibility on the search results are obtained from sources such as meta tags and OG tags, and therefore managing these tags will be important for SEO on Naver.
In sum, SEO advice from Naver is that you should ensure your site can be effectively crawled by their bot, should create easily accessible content for your audience, and that any changes to the site can be crawled by the bot and indexed accordingly.
Naver stated that they will release another set of guidelines in due course. Hopefully, they will offer more comprehensive advice to help businesses and individuals better optimize their websites for Korea’s most popular search engine.
