February 28, 2007 Comments
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Web site owners that have listings in the Yahoo Directory (remember when Yahoo was a directory instead of a search engine?) have long lamented the fact that Yahoo liked to pull the directory listing data when displaying a site in the algorithmic search results. Unfortunately, there wasn't much you could do about it, even if the title was outdated. Until now. Danny Sullivan covers the change in policy over at Search Engine Land.
From Danny's post:
Sometimes pages are listed in both Yahoo's crawler-based search results and within its human-compiled directory, the Yahoo Directory. In those cases, Yahoo usually replaces the title and description of a web page in the crawler-based results with the information from the Yahoo Directory. Yahoo has operated this way for as long as I can remember -- that's over a decade :)
Danny wrote a story last year about the impact that this policy could have on a web site. His example? Alaskan Tony Knowles who ran for governor last year while Yahoo continued to show him as "Democratic candidate from Alaska for U.S. Senate, 2004." Yeah, not cool.
Now there's a solution. By inserting this meta tag on any page:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
You can ensure that Yahoo will not use a directory description it might have for that page. NOTE: The Yahoo Search Blog currently has a typo, saying "name=robot" rather that name="robots" that's long been used.
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
The first tag tells any spider that wants to recognize the tag not to use a Yahoo Directory title or description. Of course, no other spiders do that -- but Yahoo's just building in some protection should that come up in the future. The second tag specifically tells the Yahoo spider not to use the information.
Don't think that snippet gets you out of reading Danny's full post though. He also offers up information on dealing with ODP/DMOZ data that sometimes appears on Google, Yahoo and Windows Live.
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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