Opt Out of DMOZ Descriptions at MSN Search
Have you ever been frustrated over having a description that appears in your DMOZ (The Open Directory) listing appear in the results pages of search engines? Well MSN has done something about it. They are recognizing a new meta tag that allows you opt out of having DMOZ data show for your listing. Why would you care about this?
Well for starters, you may have a listing in DMOZ that is out of date or inaccurate and no matter what you do to try to get it updated, you efforts fail. It is also possible that the description a DMOZ editor wrote for your site is not optimal for your marketing purposes.
What MSN has done is to introduce a new option at the page level, a robots meta tag that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet. This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file.
So in your Web page you’d put -
< META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP” >
or
< META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP” >
In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to MSN. MSN provides the following caution however:
“Putting either tag in your pages will not make your search results descriptions change immediately – they will change once our crawler has re-crawled the page. Usually that takes about 1 day to 4 weeks for us to re-crawl you.”
Kudos to Microsoft for allowing webmasters to have better control over how their pages appear is the search results.
About the Author: David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Since 1997, David has been involved in developing successful search engine and social media marketing campaigns for large and small businesses. Follow 
CEO | Sep 23, 2006 | Reply
Thanks Dave for the really informative article! It has meant a world of difference to our company which has had a real time of it trying to override the completely inaccurate information about our site originating from the DMOZ Open Directory Project.
Your article describes exactly what we’ve been through with them- i.e. absolutely no service or effective avenues of communication and a very poor organisational culture in general.
Indeed, we’ve come to the conclusion that the NOODP tag is the most intelligent solution for organisations wishing to override the ODP altogether and have ourselves as an enterprise chosen to take that route.
The only remaining problem (for academic and highly specialised businesses) are the hundreds of small directories which inadvertently import DMOZ Open Directory Project data without understanding that that information may not even be true or that it is horrendously outdated. I hope their webmasters are reading up on current developments!
Yours,
G K A Njalsson
CEO