Austin Web Design & Internet Marketing Blog

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Problems with your DMOZ listing?

A tip on how to override an outdated description

We had a problem with our DMOZ listing on Google.  We wrote it years ago and it described things we did way back when but no long provide, like hosting.  We had writen DMOZ many times to update it, but nothing happened.  Doing some research on the web I read that a number of people were reporting this problem.  There was one business that used to be a husband and wife team, but were now divorced and they could not get DMOZ to change their listing.  So add this code to your pages:

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

Here's what Matthew Diehl has written about it and we have taken his advice:

The noydir and noodp are Meta Robots commands that instruct search engine bots on how to handle the usage of data for your site in the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project/DMOZ Directory.

The noydir command corresponds to the Yahoo! Directory and the noodp command correlates to DMOZ.

noydir Explained
When a site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory there is a title and description associated with that listing. So, Yahoo! started showing that title and description as the linking text and snippet text in the search engine results page (SERP) whenever that website would show up (most commonly only the homepage). The noydir command overrides this functionality and gives control back to the website owner to control the linking and snippet text in the SERPs via the Title tag and Meta Description tag on their website. By regaining this control you can adjust those fields whenever desired.

noodp Explained
The same functionality goes for the noodp command. However, this is directed at Google. Google partnered with ODP to power the Google Directory so if you website was listed in DMOZ then Google would pull that listing information as the linking and snippet text in the Google SERPs. The noodp overrides that functionality and give you control back.

Implementation
The most common implementation is to do both commands simultaneously as in your question like such:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir,noodp” /> (content field order does not matter)

They can also be listed separately as such:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

You can also direct the commands to the specific bots as such:
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noodp” />
<meta name=”slurp” content=”noydir” />

Matthew Diehl is the Senior SEO Strategist at Charles River Interactive a nationally recognized search engine marketing agency located in suburban Boston, MA that focuses on delivering ROI and driving businesses' potential online through search.

We thank Matthew for solving our problem this this great tip.

Bob Atchison

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