We’ve been asking for some time. It was even promised as a possible future development. Well now it is finally arrived – support for a “NOYDIR” meta tag.
Web site owners have long been frustrated over the lack of control they have had in they way their home page appears in the Yahoo! search results if they are also listed in the Yahoo! Directory. This due to the fact that Yahoo! would use the title and description from the directory listing as opposed to the site’s title tag and meta description tag and/or snippet of content from the actual web page.
Now that will all change. Webmaster have the choice to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory being shown in the search results pages. Simply insert the following meta tag in between the opening and closing ‘head’ tags on your home page:
<META NAME=”ROBOT” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
or
<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
Yahoo! says they are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change and that we should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. Other regions will roll-out in the near future. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.
If you recall, late last year Yahoo! adopted support for the “NOODP” tag which allowed webmasters to opt out from having Open Directory information displayed in the search results.
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.
