Opting Out of the Use of DMOZ Descriptions in Search Results

MSN Search has started to act upon a new robots meta tag that tells the MSN search bot not to use the description in your DMOZ directory listings as the description in your search results. This new meta tag will be welcomed by webmasters who prefer to have control over the descriptions in their search listings.

The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) is a repository of millions of human-edited website descriptions. Major search engines have come to depend upon and often use these DMOZ descriptions as text displayed under the title of your search results. The problem has always been that you may want to say something different about your site than the DMOZ editor decided to say about it when your DMOZ listing was created.

A new page level robots meta tag is now recognized by the MSN search bot, and tells it not to use the DMOZ site description in MSN Search results. To implement the new tag, put:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

or

<meta name="msnbot" content="noodp">

in your web pages.

The first of these will potentially apply to all search engine crawlers, and the second just to MSN Search. At this time, MSN Search is the only search engine to support this tag, so the two are the same for the moment. However, it is hoped that other search engines will follow suit and support the tag, so we'd suggest using the first option.

This is a great way to potentially enhance the clickthrough ratio of your search listings on the MSN Search engine, especially if your DMOZ site description is poorly written or not representative of what you offer.