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In a move that web site owners have been clamoring for forever, MSN has become the first major search engine to give site owners a real way to opt out of having their DMOZ description show as the default descriptive text for their web site on the search results page. This move will be especially useful for older sites that have long outgrown DMOZ descriptions that may be several years old and full of inaccuracies.
You can read all about the new option at the MSN Search WebLog where it's laid out in pretty good detail. From the post:
What has bothered the webmasters previously is that when search engines preferred search result descriptions from dmoz.org, they did not empower webmasters to opt-out of those descriptions. This can be especially annoying if the descriptions from dmoz.org are outdated, or just plain inaccurate.
So what we did was introduce a new option at the page level - a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet. This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file.
So in your Web page you’d put
< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" >
or
< META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP" >
In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to us. As far as we know right now, we are the only search engine to support this tag, so the two are the same for the moment. But when others follow suit, you could use the second tag to get only MSN to ignore ODP content for your page.
The blog goes on to note that it could take up to a few weeks for the change to show up in the search results.
Oh yeah and Kudos! to MSN Search for giving webmasters this option.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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