Meta Tag for MSN Search Results Without ODP Descriptions

May 23rd, 2006

Many times MSN Search results are sourced from descriptions from dmoz.org, the amazing Open Directory Project – a repository of millions of sites in a human edited directory.

However, recently many webmasters wanted more control of how their websites displayed in MSN search results with reduced dependance on the ODP editor listed title and descriptions.

Now MSN Search has created a new option at the page level – a robots meta tag that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet.

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.

This provides an opt out option for webmasters who are unhappy with the dmoz affecting their MSN search results. Volunteer ODP editors take great effort to list your website accurately and are very helpful to sort out errors with your Dmoz listing via feedback.

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