MSN make DMOZ description optional

Many search engines make use of titles and descriptions in DMOZ, displaying them in place of site titles and meta descriptions. From the search engine’s point of view, this is beneficial as it ensures that descriptions are well written, concise and not exploited to give better search engine listings. However, if you have a site that updates regularly or has changed since it was listed in DMOZ, you may find that your listing’s description is out of date and inaccurate. To solve this problem, MSN have introduced a new meta tag that will stop it from pulling descriptions from DMOZ.

If you do not want MSN to display DMOZ information in its description of your site, you can add the following tag into your meta structure: <meta NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>. Of course, you could always contact DMOZ and request that they change your description, but there is no guarentee that this will be done quickly (if at all).

This new meta tag has caused quite a lot of controversy amongst webmasters and SEOs. Many people feel that this choice defeats the purpose of using DMOZ data, while others believe that more choice is a good thing and this is a great way to avoid innaccurate DMOZ descriptions. Please leave a comment to let us know what you think.

Dave Stewart
SEO Consultant

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