Search engines such as Google and Yahoo recently began supporting a new value for your robots meta tag that would prevent them from forcing your DMOZ (Open Directory Project) title and description to be used in your search engine results. DMOZ is the source Google uses to populate it’s own browseable directory of websites and Yahoo as well will pull information from it for listings from time to time. The issues that would result from this often would be that an old outdated name or description of a site or company would appear in listings despite the site itself having newer more appropriate information. Since DMOZ is volunteer driven getting things submitted, much less updated, has progressively gotten more and more difficult if not altogether impossible. The support of a NOODP meta tag allowed your site’s current information to override and the problem was solved.
However, Yahoo has it’s own directory which has served as the core of their services for a long time, which means it often contains a lot of old outdated titles and descriptions. Getting those updated requires access to the Yahoo account that originally submitted the site for inclusion and for many people this can be information long gone as employees and email accounts change over time. The same issue could be found in Yahoo search results where the directory listing overrides a site’s careful crafted title and descriptions from the actual site. The Yahoo directory titles and descriptions are sparse and cannot contain any sales driven copy, which means being able to present an attractive listing in the search results is difficult when your directory listing overpowers. To combat this, Yahoo has announced support for a new robots meta tag value, NOYDIR, which works just like the NOODP tag. This is good news for sites locked into an outdated Yahoo directory listing!
Tags: seo, title, tags, description, metas, noydir, yahoo, search, engine