In my last post, I took you through the explanation from Naver detailed in their own announcement about Libra. This time, I’m going to look at the specifics in much greater detail. Just below, you will find what criteria Naver itself thinks is good and bad for a blog post.

Good Posts

Naver considers following criteria as important in order to qualify for a ‘good post’:

• The blog post is based on trustworthy and credible information
• Content regarding products or places is written on the basis of own experiences
• The content is unique and not copied or just slightly edited material from other sources
• The post offers helpful and sufficient information or analytical content regarding the concerning topic
• The content makes the reader want to bookmark or share it with other friends
• The post is written with the reader and not the search engine in mind
• The content is easy to read and understand

On the other side, following criteria are considered as harmful or spammy and will at least have a negative influence on the rankings:

Harmful Posts

These posts are being considered as illegal or dangerous for the users by Naver, and therefore normally taken out of the search results as soon as they are discovered:

• Illegal posts with obscene, criminal, suicidal, gambling-related, etc. content or posts referring to sites about these topics
• Posts infringing privacy policy, copyrights or personal information
• Content, which can be harmful for users, such as phishing or malware related posts

Spammy Posts

Most of the points Naver states in this section are already well known black hat methods for anyone in touch with SEO. Here is the summary:

• Scraped content or keyword-stuffed posts
• Content solely written by machines or software programs
• Content which is shown differently to search engines than to users (cloaking)
• Postings with hidden keywords (e.g. by using small fonts)
• Posts with forced redirects through widgets or scripts
• Blog posts with content unrelated to the (optimized) keyword
• Copied content from other web properties or duplicated content
• Manipulated posts: Logging in with multiple ID’s and writing fake comments in order to push up traffic and popularity
• Not credible posts: E.g. faked reviews about products or services

Most of these points seem very natural or basic for anyone who has built up some experience in SEO for the big search engines in the Western world. However, many of these manipulative methods seemed to work until very recently on Naver. It needs to be observed how effective ‘Libra’ will be and how much it really is going to change in the Korean SEO industry. Any thoughts or opinions? Please let me know!