Don’t Search Engines display your description meta tag?

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Get rid of those directory snippets using NOODP & NOYDIR

When one of your web site’s pages shows up in a list of results on a search engine, what do people see? Often the contents of the description tag of your pages are displayed in the search results.

At other times the search engines will display portions of your page’s content which contain words used in the search query. This helps people to see if your page is relevant to their search request.

Sometimes, if you are listed in DMOZ (ODP), the search engines will display snippets of text about your site taken from them instead of your description meta tag. You can force the search engine to ignore the ODP information by including a robots meta tag like this: <meta name="robots" content="noodp" />.

The "NOODP" robots meta tag is fully supported by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

If the search engine (in this case, Yahoo!) displays information about your site taken from the Yahoo! Directory instead of your description meta tag, you can force it to ignore the directory information by including a robots meta tag like this: <meta name="robots" content="noydir" />.

It should also be perfectly reasonable to specify instructions for each individual crawling robot, such as indicated below.

One of the most succinct methods is to use a single robots meta tag with multiple attributes separated by commas like this: <meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir" />.

Currently, only Yahoo!’s spider, Slurp, uses the Yahoo! Directory.

Be aware that, once you add any of the above meta tags to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear.

It is hoped that these examples illustrate several of the methods at your disposal that will help you to tailor the way search engines index a given web page.

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About this SEO tutorial

This tutorial was written by John S. Britsios, Web Architect & Senior SEO Consultant at SEO Workers. For reproduction, please read our reproduction of articles & tutorials policy.

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For web crawlers (bots), and not for human visitors

For web crawlers (bots), and not for human visitors

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