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July 20, 2006
Google Now Supports the NOODP Tag
By Curtis Friedl
As mentioned in a previous MarketPosition article, MSN announced their support for two new tags that can be entered into the header of your html documents. Using these tags will indicate to MSN that you prefer your own site's title and description information rather then the use of the Open Directory header information that it may currently be using.
Below is an example of what you may use:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
If you want to just exclude a specific engine, use:
<META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">
Google has responded by adding support for these new Meta elements as well. This is good news for webmasters caught in the dilemma of having poor or outdated descriptions, pulled from the Open Directory listings. These older listings can have a negative effect on your organic traffic because a search engines user's impression of your site's description often determines whether they will select your link or a competitor's. Ultimately these changes will impact the effect that site improvements have on bottom line sales and revenue.
It is important to understand that changes to this information in a search engines database will take time to update. Updating your tags today may take several weeks to have an impact on the engines listings. In one test that we have preformed Google has visited the site numerous times over the past 3 weeks; the cached copy indicated a cache date of July 13th. The updates to the site were made prior to the 13th, and had not yet appeared in the cached portion of the search results. It appears that there may be a delay between the caching of the site, and the publishing in Google's search results.
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