dmoz = google won't let go

Is the dmoz listing why our homepage is still listed in google?

[latimer]

We decided to dump our old site because of google penalty. We have disallowed google from the old site including the homepage, but google still shows our old homepage in their index. Is this because of the dmoz listing? We have requested dmoz to change url but they have not responded thus far. Any suggestions on how we can get our old homepage out of google even if it is still listed in dmoz? The old site is still spidered and listed with other engines. How important is dmoz with the other engines? Our new site seems to be doing just fine without dmoz listing, and wondering if dmoz is really worth it.

[ciml]

I would always try to get the ODP listing changed, but if there are links to the page and you don't want even the URL to appear in Google then a 404 redirect would accomplish this (and loose the PR).

A 301 might accomplish this and transfer the PageRank, but I wouldn't be certain.

[Zamboni]

I think this issue is related to the information I'm looking for. There is an old competitors site listed ahead of mine. 3 months ago it had a notice from the ISP that the site had been removed for non-payment. This notice was in the Google description at the time. For the past two months only the Welcome to IIS placeholder message has been on the site and the google description reads.

Welcome To IIS 4.0!
... We welcome your feedback! It's important that we incorporate your feedback into our
software. Please send any comments or suggestions ....

This has been in the 7th position for my primary search term for two months. The page obviously doesn't have any of the search terms anymore so how much worth is Google placing on updated content on the page these days?

[wicomputergod]

Ciml:

Hi I have a question regarding your response to Latimer.

You suggested using a 404 redirect as an option. Would that then mean that all requests for that page would get a 404 Or would I have to write a script that would redirect only the useragents I want excluded to a 404 (i.e. googlebot)?

On google there is a reference to using meta tags to exclude just google from an existing page. See googles www.google.com/remove.html page.

This is the code they provide.

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

However the question still remains that if DMOZ still has this listing, will google include it within its index.

[ciml]

Most user agents will follow a 404 redirect (404 header + Location header). I'm pretty sure that Googlebot will fail to index or follow it, but also it won't list the URL. Banning by /robots.txt will prevent Google from fetching it, but the URL can still be listed.