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June 27, 2006
New Robot Command For MSN
By Scott Goodyear
Sometimes when checking your rankings do you find that the description of your site is outdated or incorrect? You may wish to check the cached version of your page in order to see if the engine has simply been using an older, cached version of your page. But what if they do have your current page cached?
At times engines find it better to use the description of your page or site as listed on a third party site like the Open Directory. But what if you've been trying unsuccessfully to get the Open Directory to update your listing? MSN may have a solution.
If the results of a MSN search do not match the actual information on your page and you believe that they are using the Open Directory listing for your page, MSN reports that you can use one of the following tags in the header area of your page to show that you prefer that they use your site's information rather than the Open Directory's listing when they next visit the page in question:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
or
<META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">
Currently this command only works for the MSN engine when added to the meta tags of a given page. This is not however, a command that can be used in the robots.txt file. Ideally this command would be usable in a site wide robots.txt file, however even in this limited implementation, this is a good start toward giving greater control to web masters over the way their sites will appear in the search results. We can only hope that other engines will follow MSN's lead.
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