Naver Blog Optimization

You might just want to start your own Naver Blog and reach out to your audience by providing useful content. Or you may already have a Naver Blog running and looking to optimize your blog. Either way, here are some of the things to note about optimizing your Naver Blog.

C-Rank Algorithm Applied on Naver Blog Search

In our Naver Algorithm section of the Naver SEO Guide, we explained the ranking signals for C-Rank based on Naver’s latest announcements. In short, C-Rank is the Naver algorithm measuring the authority and quality of blogs, applied also to cafes and Q&A posts.

So, what does the SERP look like when the algorithm has been applied?

Naver shared an example that shows how a blog with expertise and depth in a specific topic would rank higher than a blog that posts daily out of obligation. Take a look below comparing the Naver Blog SERP before and after C-Rank for post-pregnancy diet.

The top-ranking blog posts on the left before C-Rank are not unique and are promotional (posted by Chinese medicine centers). Compare these with the blogs on the right from a fitness center and a pregnancy consultation center that provide legitimately useful content on post-pregnancy diet. According to Naver, these blogs are ranking highly based on the C-Rank algorithm because they both consistently provided professional diet-related content (the fitness center) and pregnancy-related content (pregnancy consultation center) in their past posts.

Importance of Blog Category Selection

Because C-Rank displays results based on the topic matching the keyword, it is more likely for a blog specializing in a specific topic to rank higher in the search results than a blog that doesn’t have a focus topic.

While the algorithm can detect the topics of blog posts through deep-learning, Naver states that manually setting the topic of each blog post can increase the accuracy of detecting the topic and therefore help the post to rank higher. Knowing the lack of technical prowess of Naver, we recommend utilizing all the manual settings available instead of relying on the Naver algorithms.

To date, there are 31 topics under four main categories bloggers can choose from for each post:

According to Naver, setting an accurate blog post topic is crucial as it helps to display a search result that best matches the search intent.

Knowing the proportion of blogs in each category can give you an insight into how competitive the category might be. You can check out the Korean website www.blogchart.co.kr for the latest data as the numbers are updated in real-time, but here’s an example of the chart you can find on the blog category selection from over 10 million blogs as of June 2017:

What stands out is the proportion of blogs that have selected “Travel/Accommodation”. Indeed, travel is a popular content category in Korea and you’ll find staggering competition for most keywords in this category (look at the example in the next section!).

Remember, however, that competitiveness ultimately varies at the individual keyword level rather than at the blog category level.

Unique Blogs Stand Out From Stiff Competition

With so much content created on Naver, it’s not enough for you to simply create a good post to win the competition on the SERPs. Like the following example of “places to go in Hong Kong (홍콩가볼만한곳)”, some keywords have thousands (if not millions!) of existing posts you’ll need to compete with:

Although it may sound elusive, the suggestion is to differentiate yourself from the competition by providing unique content. In line with this tip, you should refer to the blogs that have been selected as “This Month’s Blogs” – a selection of top blogs in their categories that replaced the Naver Power Blogs in 2016. For more information on the Power Blog system and This Month’s Blogs, check out our article at the link provided. The idea is that blogs are selected on factors that distinguish them from the myriad of other blogs out there and studying the blogs that have been selected would give you a better idea of the standards required to be a truly unique blog.

Image Usage

Excluding the basic rules of the internet around image use (e.g. no copyright infringement, inappropriate and adult content), here are Naver’s specific guidelines that are worth noting to improve your blog and your rankings

1. Use descriptive file names and captions

File names also provide information about the image and captions can be added directly on the blog post editor.

2. Check your main image to ensure blog thumbnail is displayed

On the Naver SERP, each ranking blog post has a thumbnail you can set using one of the images in your post. The thumbnail shows up like this:

Because it is an image that supports the title and description of the blog post and helps a searcher determine whether the post is relevant to click through to, having it show up is important. Meet the following conditions to ensure your thumbnail is displayed.

Image size should exceed 40x40px for Naver Blogs and 150x150px for external blogs

Image should not be too long or too flat

External blogs should have the image and the entire post content in the blog’s RSS – this is because external blogs are crawled based on their RSS and having just a snippet of the RSS does not allow images to be found

3. Using the same image in different posts will not receive a penalty

Tread carefully with this one. Using the same image repeatedly in your blog posts does increase the similarity index that Naver assigns to content – similar content can be deindexed from the search results. But reusing one image will not raise the similarity index to a level that gives you a penalty.

4. Number of images has no direct relevance to rankings

5. Higher resolution images are preferred

But only to an extent that it provides a good user experience. Excessively large images will not help blog posts in their rankings.

6. Types of images to avoid

Images with heavy promotional text:

Images with repetitive and irrelevant text:

Images that are irrelevant to the content:

In-Post Links

Abusing in-post links can get you caught in Naver’s spam filter. Here’s what can be considered spam when it comes to links:

Clickbait that links to a different page than a user expected Links to illegal/spam sites Excessive links Repetitive links Using the same link in multiple posts that have no relevance to the post

Useful tips: