SEO in Manhattan, NYC

If you are lucky enough to get into the DMOZ directory, aka the Open Directory Project or ODP - it takes forever to get included in the directory - you may find that your description in Google search is the same as the one you submitted to DMOZ. In the past webmasters and SEOs submitted their site to DMOZ in order to control what is displayed in Google search. Even the description meta tag was overlooked and the DMOZ description given priority. The problem was that some descriptions in DMOZ were outdated and webmasters and SEOs would have to update the description in DMOZ. Now, think about it, if it takes forever to get included in the directory, how long do you think it took to get your description to get updated? To make matters even worse you had to abide by the rules in DMOZ for description - you had to keep it short, concise, and bland. How could you control your description once DMOZ has accepted your URL submission?

So Google came up with a way for webmasters to tell the Google robot crawlers that you prefer not to use the description in DMOZ but rather the one in the description meta tag. The solution they came up with was a command you can include in your Robots meta tag.

If you want the command to apply to all search engines, the robot meta tag would look like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you want the command to apply to only Google, the tag would look like this:

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noodp” />

The “noodp” command stands for No ODP (as in don’t use the ODP/DMOZ description). MSN was one of the first search engines that followed this command. Google followed suit once they realized it was a worthwhile approach at the problem experienced by webmasters.