Anyone else had their DMOZ title appear in SERPS?

Perhaps Google is going to have greater DMOZ emphasis...

[Chris_1]

I was checking one of our sites in Google and was surprised by the title that appears. This site's entry page currently has zero meta tags on it (I pulled them off the site to see what effect it would have).

I used a search term I haven't used much in the past.

Anyway, I couldn't figure out where the description came from and began checking around. The site is listed in the DMOZ/ODP twice: once for topic and once for region. The regional listing is the newer of the two listings, and THAT is where the description is coming from. That description isn't used anywhere else on our site (and never has been), and only one word of the three word phrase I searched for appears in the DMOZ description.

I thought only Yahoo used their directory titles in their SERPS, but, perhaps Google is going to start leaning towards doing the same; maybe they are testing it out? I wonder what flag or trigger would cause Google to pull a DMOZ description?

Perhaps Google is experimenting with starting to assign much greater value to your DMOZ/ODP description?

Chris

[canthavejust1]

About 5 years ago, the first site I successfully ranked in the top 10 for several keywords was listed in DMOZ. Google used their description back then. Any site I got listed in DMOZ always ranked better in Google, as well as other SE's. I just assumed it's always been that way. That's why it's so frustrating to wait so long to get listed in DMOZ. So much of the Internet is tied to it.

If you have any doubts about the connection, go to this link. [google.com...]

[Dynamoo]

Google dropped the DMOZ snippet a while back, when they also got rid of the directory from the home page and the site category from the SERPs. In my view it was a step back in usability, so it's possible one of the datacenters is trying it again.

My personal experience is that DMOZ listed sites tend to do better from Allegra, *but* they may still not be indexed properly.

On the issue of search engines being scrapers of the ODP.. well, of course to a large extent all of them are. Sure, there's "only" 4.4 million entries, but you only need to crawl a couple of levels from those 4.4 million to have a pretty good chunk of the web.

[Boaz]

Errr.. this thread was originally about Google using the DMOZ title, not about the description (?) I agree about the description sometimes being used, I have yet to see the DMOZ title being used as the listing title.

[davelms]

There is a site in my area of interest that has been in domain parking (holding and for sale, showing google adsense ads, whatever that status it is called) now for a long time. All internal pages disappeared and it simply dropped out of SERPS altogether for the past two years now. This month it returned. Its title is the current one associated with the domain parking, yet its description has been taken from DMOZ (where it remains listed). This site has only made a re-appearance in the past fortnight. Its high ranking appear to be coming from the keywords within the DMOZ description, the holding page for the site has no description. The google cache shows the holding page with no evidence of anything else unusual. Just thought I'd add this to your discussion.

[eibbed]

Interesting thread. We run quite a few sites and the one's with a DMOZ listing get into the Google SERPS faster with a higher ranking than some of the sites that haven't yet made it into DMOZ.

Trouble is, and everybody here knows it, DMOZ takes so long to list a site that you have to wonder if it's worth it no matter how relevant, targeted or acturate DMOZ listing actually are.

It is obvious that Google does pay some attension to DMOZ but to what extent and are they paying more attension at the moment, who knows.