Google Now Supports the NOODP Meta Tag

The NOODP meta tag prevents Google from using your website's title and/or description from the Open Directory (aka DMOZ) in its search engine results. The NOODP meta tag will also work with MSN.

Here is the Meta-Tag to use:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

You can read more about Google's new Support of the NOODP tag over on Matt Cutts Blog.

Thanks Tim. Im thinking it will be safe to assume that Yahoo will be joining in supporting the new tag at some point, but maybe I shouldn't just assume. Of course now I need to get into ODP so I can tell Google and MSN to stop using the description they'll find.

I would assume it will be of no great help for a simple reason that ODP description is shown when G cannot find anything relevant and if there isnt any relevant it hardly matters if it shows ODP description. Also if you use NOODP tag what will the description be when it does not find one is a big question.

I think it will either default to your own meta desctiption or a snippet from the page. I forget (if I ever even new) how Google decides which to use, but they use all three (the third being the DMOZ description). If you have the NOODP they just won't include DMOZ as one of the options.

Oh, when I mentioned Yahoo above I forgot that Yahoo doesn't use the DMOZ description so they don't need to join in on the NOODP fun. They'll probably continue to pull descriptions from their own directory.

I added the NOODP meta tag months ago when MSN first started using it and noticed that Google had started as well. I did this because after finally having my DMOZ description updated 5 months ago, it wastn't being updated on Google or MSN, still the outdated description. This meta tag is a blessing.