For those of you lucky enough to make into the DMOZ directory but don’t want their descriptions or titles popping up in Yahoo search results, we have good news. According to their blog, Yahoo Search now supports the NOODP tag, which instructs Yahoo’s algorithm to ignore the ODP (which stands for Open Directory Project, another name for DMOZ) description and title in favor of your own.
If you’d like to avoid the DMOZ description, place the following attribute(s) in your page’s header:
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”
or
META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP”
If you are unsure of what I’m talking about, I’ll explain a little further. When sites appear in search results, they show up with a description and title. For instance, this is Murdok’ description in Yahoo:
Murdok – Breaking eBusiness News
Breaking eBusiness news. Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.
…which is taken from our meta description. If Yahoo was using the DMOZ description, murdok’s would read differently.
If you are happy with the way ODP describes your site, then including the NOODP attribute is unnecessary. But, if you’ve spent a great deal of time crafting your site’s description and don’t want to run the risk of another one being used, then by all means, implement NOODP.
Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | Murdok Blog
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