Do your MSN search results show your DMOZ descriptions?

DMOZ requires you to write lame descriptions of your web site.  Usually to get approved by DMOZ you have to rewrite your description and take out some of the promotional text and make it very boring.  You can’t use too many keywords in your description or the DMOZ editor might rewrite your description or not include your site.

BUT did you know that MSN search uses your site’s DMOZ description when they list your site in search results?

So, how do you change this? 

According to the MSN Search weblog you can use these tags in your HTML to tell MSN Search NOT to use your DMOZ description.  Instead they’d use your meta-description.  This won’t help your search results, but it will help the way your site looks when it shows up in the search results.

What we did was 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 content=”NOODP” name=”ROBOTS”>

or
<meta content=”NOODP” name=”msnbot”>

In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to us. As far as we know right now, we are the only search engine  to support this  tag, so the two are the same for the moment. But when others follow suit, you could use the second tag to get only MSN to ignore ODP content for your page.

A word of caution: 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 -4 weeks for us to re-crawl you (ok, that sounds odd, but we hope you know what we mean). 

 - Ben Fitts

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