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Yahoo Adds New Meta Tag, More Control Over Your Search Engine Listings

March 15, 2007 By Webposition SEO Team

by Scott Goodyear

Do you have a listing in Yahoo’s Directory? Does the description of your site work well for their directory but not so well when customers are performing searches for your products or services? In response to last year’s announcement by Microsoft to support a NOODP or No Open Directory/Dmoz tag, Yahoo has created a “no Yahoo Directory” tag.

Some commercial sites pay Yahoo $300 per year for a listing in the Yahoo Directory. Sites like Best Buy show up under the Yahoo “Shopping > Consumer Electronics” category. There is what their listing currently looks like:

Because they do not use the new Yahoo No Y Directory tag, this means that if the main Bestbuy.com page shows up under a normal web search, the same Yahoo Directory listing may show up. When performing this contrived search, Best Buy happens to show up in the search results. The first listing uses the Yahoo Directory listing for the search term. If this were a normal search for a term like “MP3 player”, and this Best Buy listing did show up in the search results, the click through rate would be low because it is not MP3 related. The second result is a little better as it uses text from the MP3 player page rather than the Yahoo Directory listing:

If you sell quite a few items, your Yahoo Directory listing may not be best for your search results. You may want to implement the new NOYDIR tag. To implement this tag, you will need to add this information to the meta tags of your pages:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

or

<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

Should you always use this? It obviously depends. In Best Buy’s case, their home page normally does not focus on any one particular area. Often when I visit it, when they do focus on a particular area, it is mainly through graphics and not SEO’d text. Thus, in this particular case, it may be GOOD that they do not use the NOYDIR meta tag on their main page. However if they had listings for searches on MP3 players, TV brands, etc. that did show up with the Yahoo Directory listing, I’d recommend that they implement the NOYDIR tag on those pages in a heartbeat.