Why Korean product pages are invisible to search engines

✦What it looks like

Open a Korean online store and scroll a product page. You will get a long, beautifully art directed strip: headline, lifestyle photography, specifications, comparison table, care instructions, shipping policy.

Now try to select the text with your cursor.

On a lot of these pages you cannot, because there is no text. The entire page is one or more tall images with the words rendered into them. Headings, body copy, tables, all of it, baked in as pixels.

✦Why Korean sites do this

It is worth understanding that this is not incompetence. There are real reasons behind it.

Korean web design puts a high value on visual polish, and the local marketplaces reinforced the pattern. The long image format is native to Naver Smart Store and Coupang, so an entire generation of sellers and design shops learned to produce assets that way. If your Korean partner builds you a page, this is very likely what you will get, and they will be proud of it.

An SEO specialist I recorded with put it well. Korean websites are unusually attractive, and part of the reason that was possible is that nobody was optimizing them for search.

✦What the crawler sees

Nothing. Or close to it.

Search engines read text. An image of text is not text. Without alt attributes there is no signal at all about what the page covers, which means the page cannot rank for the things it actually talks about.

Two related points from Google's own documentation are worth knowing:

• CSS background images are not indexed

  Google states that it does not index images loaded through CSS. If your visual is a background rather than an img element, it is invisible to image search as well.

• Alt text is the most important image attribute

  Google describes alt text as the most important metadata you can provide, and says it uses alt text along with computer vision and page content to understand what an image shows. It also warns that filling alt text with keywords can be treated as spam.

There is a second order effect too. Those long images are usually large files. Google has said that when a site responds slowly, it reduces how much it crawls. So the format can cost you twice: nothing to read, and fewer visits from the crawler.

✦How to check in thirty seconds

1. Try to select the text. Drag your cursor across a heading in the middle of the page. If nothing highlights, it is an image.
2. Use your browser's find function. Search the page for a phrase you can see with your eyes. If the browser cannot find it, neither can a crawler.
3. View the page source and search for that same phrase. Same test, more reliable.

Do this on your three most commercially important Korean pages. It takes two minutes and it explains a surprising number of mysteries.

✦How to fix it without losing the design

You do not have to make your site uglier. The goal is that the same information exists in a form a machine can read.

If you are commissioning a new Korean site, put this in the brief before design starts. Retrofitting it later costs several times more than asking for it upfront. How a Korean SEO project runs, step by step, is set out on the service page.

✦Common questions