DMOZ and MSN Listings

May 23rd, 2006

DMOZ, the human edited directory project, is one of the largest directories on the internet, and a listing in it can boost your visitor numbers dramatically. It’s also used by many other sites for their own directory, including Google. One thing that frustrates webmasters however is that so much importance is placed on the listings found within the DMOZ directory that MSN and Google sometimes use the description from DMOZ as the description of your site in the SERPs.

Now, usually this isn’t a problem.. but what if the description isn’t great for your site? Or what if the site has entirely different content from when it was added to DMOZ, and it’s description isn’t relevant any more? MSN has listened to webmasters and given a way to opt out of using the DMOZ description for it’s listings.

How do you implement it?

Place one of these tags with the other meta tags on your page.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

or

<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

Keep in mind, it may take a few weeks for MSN to notice this tag in your pages.