The Situation:
Are you seeing your site get listed in SERPs with a different TITLE, which may be outdated and mostly a non-relevant one? Worried, by seeing a drop in the visitor stats | ranks? Okay… I don’t want you to be worried more…just a couple of questions more to find out the reasons behind. Could you remember when you submitted your sites in DMOZ? Did you ever tracked whether they get approved or not…? Are they the same ’snipptes’ (Titles and descriptions) with what you are seeing in the SERPs currently? If yes, then here is the solution.
We all know, Google and other major SEs are using automated programs to process the SERPs. While they are manually unable to edit the listings, some options are given to the webmasters to let them know how they want to be get listed. Sometimes as we see here, Google uses the Open Directory Project to display the snippets (titles and descriptions) for our sites. We can direct them whether to use the DMOZ listing or not.
The Solution:
To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page’s description, use the following:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page’s description, use the following:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">
If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP, NOFOLLOW">
Word from the Author:
Last month we saw in most of the Forums, people were worried about the DMOZ listings in their SERPs. MSN was the first one to declare the above solutions to the webmasters who were unhappy with this. Does that mean, they are listening to us? I think they were from the begining itself. Google was late but now you can see the matter is taken into the ALGO and added to the Webmaster help page . The results are visible and acknowledges as working by the experts in the community, so it’s a good try I believe.
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