Search Engine War: NOODP - Opt Out of DMOZ snippets in Google

Categories

Not sure where your Meta Description or Title originated from, does it differ from what's in your website?

The title and description used in the snippet displayed within the Google search results could have been pulled in from your website description as listed in DMOZ (The Open Directory Project - ODP).

From experience, if the description or title were incorrect or out of date, trying to get them changed could be a very frustrating and sometimes fruitless process, as DMOZ isn't exactly renowned for the hastiness of its updates.

The good news is that Google now offers an 'opt out' tag, so that your descriptions no longer have to use the DMOZ snippet at all.

When using the 'opt out' tag <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP"> ensure that your homepage (as far as we know this is the only page it applies to) has a good Title and Meta Description.

Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering, posted the following:

"The way we generate the descriptions (snippets) that appear under a page in the search results is completely automated. The process uses both the content on a page as well as references to it that appear on other sites.

One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we're happy to let you all know we've added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.

To direct all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page's description, use the following: