Google's use of DMOZ titles is hurting traffic

Minstrel hits the nail on the head. I'm not interested in pagerank from odp. I've already got a listing right? It's the impact on the usability and usefulness of Google search results that is in question here when the anchor text chosen by the dmoz editor is displayed in Google search results.

This isn't about dmoz, go, do your thing, it's great... we are talking about the impact of Google's using your editor's anchor text as titles and the negative impact on our click through rates in search results.

Titles written by site owners should be what is shown by Google (and other search engines) as when you are top 5 or whatever and getting craploads of traffic, you should be able to adjust your title and maybe even your description experimentally to get the people clicking through to your site who are most accurately interested in the content you have on offer.

Sure dmoz gets lots of crap submitted to it and submissions aren't often authentic often to accurately represent the url submitted... but that isn't the issue here.

 

I thought this was about homeless people and how they have access to pcs to be looking up sites in Google.

 

I blame public libraries.

 

btw, I have contacted fsmedia on PM, it was actually a stupid mistake of identity and my mistake. We have sorted it out, I shouldn't have gone him, thought he was someone else who had sent me anti homeless people messages. On with the thread topic at hand.

 

Then one has to question the intelligence of posting about it in a forum titled ODP / DMOZ.

 

It was started in the Google forum... is a Google topic, but got moderated into the DMOZ section. The topic belongs in the Google section imo.

 

Well... one would question the mod that moved it here then.

 

Finally, Google supports the nooodp tag. Add this and Google won't use the anchor text from dmoz:

Add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> to your page source. If you want to just exclude MSN use <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP"> if you just want to exclude Google use <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">.

(news via SEW)

 

Awesome, isn't it?
http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/07/more-control-over-page-snippets.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&topic=8523

 

This is new to me - is there a list of meta names that I can find which Google, Y! and MSN support ?

 

from the links above:

Google:

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">

MSN:

So 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 NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

or

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

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.

 

I was asking abt tags other than ODP.
Is there a list of meta tags that specific engines look for ?

 

Meta tags specifically for robots? Noindex and nofollow. Google says they can be combined with the noodp tag, if desired. For example:

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

For more see: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35303

I expect you know about the standard meta tags: title, description and keywords? The meta title and description will generally be used by Google in presentation of a url in its SERPs. The keywords tag was so often abused that Google pays no attention to it, but some other search engines may do.

 

Here's another one someone just pointed out on another thread: nosnippet: https://www.google.com/support/webm...4&query=open+directory+project&topic=0&type=f

 

Just had my memory jogged about another robots tag - noarchive.