Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Opt Out of DMOZ Titles in MSN Search


http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2006/05/22/603917.aspx
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 This can be especially annoying if the descriptions from dmoz.org are outdated, or just plain inaccurate.

We had one customer who was frustrated because the ODP description of their site mentioned “favours” and was listed under Canada when their site was actually in the United States and was spelled as “favors”. All they wanted was a way to specify that MSN Search should use the description from their page instead of using ODP.

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"