Prayers Answered - no ODP descriptions if you add some meta

[GADOOD]

http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/07...-snippets.html

More control over page snippets

7/13/2006 10:56:00 AM

Posted by Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering

The way we generate the descriptions (snippets) that appear under a page in the search results is completely automated. The process uses both the content on a page as well as references to it that appear on other sites.

One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we're happy to let you all know we've added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.

To direct all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page's description, use the following:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

Note that not all search engines may support this meta tag, so check with each for more information.

To direct Google specifically from using this information to describe a page, use the following:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">

For more information, visit the webmaster help center.

Once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear. Once we've recrawled your pages and refreshed our index, you should see updated snippets.

[Travis]

Very nice job, Sitemaps team . There are a lot of complaints about Google using ODP titles and descriptions, hopefully this will reduce some of those complaints (from the people that care!)

[collegebarscene]

That's good to hear. I was getting a bit mad that one of my sites was pulling the dmoz title and description instead of the one on my site.

[nsusa]

It's good to hear, but on the other side it's a non-standard META tag and it should not be needed in the first place if Google would have done things right the first time. I am sick of nofollow or noodp stuff ....! One day our pages will be cluttered with non-standard tags to make it right for every search engine we are hoping to get traffic from.

What did Google say at one point? Build sites for the users and not for the search engines? .....

Christoph

[Dominic]

Its about time, thank you Google.

[an0n]

nice. google does something right!

[TehPsan]

Originally Posted by an0n

nice. google does something right!

Aren't we a bit naive here?

Oh almost forgot, thanks a lot Google!

[freespace]

Guess this only benefits those sites that are already in it.

[drhfinegifts]

Excellent find, Gadood!