I used the NOODP meta tag and my site to tanked

[DorianWeb]

I wanted to stop Google from displaying the ODP title for my site so I used the NOODP meta tag.

Before I used this tag I ranked #1 for primary keyword and #3 for the plural version of it. After I put it in... no where to be found.

What I think its doing is not counting the link from the ODP. This is scary for a couple reasons. One, it does not work as intended. Two, the amount of importance placed on an ODP link will cause it to tank if not counted.

Has anyone else experienced a drop in rankings from using NOODP?

[tedster]

So far I've had nothing but "as advertised" results with no effect on ranking. Even urls that have an extended description with site links have maintained ranking with the page's title inpplace of the ODP within a few days.

[Haecceity]

Despite using noodp on my site almost a month ago nothing has changed: not the ranking or the display of ODP data.

[Bewenched]

There's been alot of changes in the SERPs recently and they bounce back and forth almost minute to minute .. don't stress .. just enjoy not having the plain vanilla dmoz title which wont even attract users anyhow.

[nippi]

its a conincidence, i've done it on my 30 sites, no rankings impact, higher traffic in fact from the better titles in google. look for another reason

[braap]

Using tag and have increased in rank - unrelated for sure -

There is absolutely no cause - effect relationship of using NOODP and drop in rankings, just my opinion.

[CainIV]

It's doubtful without more evaluation that the noodp tag has anything to do with ranking. Anyone else see any ranking drops from using the tag that coincide with this?

[asher02]

No ranking issue at all. The only thing that changed is that the clickthrough is higher since my own title appeal more than my company name which is my ODP title.

[vincevincevince]

Question for the readers:

1.
Who would bother with NOODP tags:
Webmasters focused on quality content or webmasters focused on optimising traffic?

2.
If you were to assign NOODP a spam-score, to be used alongside thousands of other minor factors in deciding if a site is more likely to be spammy or manipulating search results, would you assign it as:
Positive (NOODP makes the site more reliable) or negative (NOODP is more likely to be part of a traffic-maniuplation attempt)?

[gstewart]

1.
Who would bother with NOODP tags:
Webmasters focused on quality content or webmasters focused on optimising traffic?

A webmaster wishing to remove a no-longer relevant or badly worded desription?

[vincevincevince]

gstewart... it's an either-or question. Which answer fits best?

[gstewart]

We're not in an exam room, vincevincevince. My answer does just fine.

[simey]

I don't get paranoid about using tags. There's too many to worry about.

[DorianWeb]

1.
Who would bother with NOODP tags:
Webmasters focused on quality content or webmasters focused on optimising traffic?

What about...
Webmasters who don't like corrupt ODP editors who are also competitors who change links and descriptions to irrelevant text.

[edited by: DorianWeb at 9:34 am (utc) on Aug. 29, 2006]

[longen]

Who knows about the NOODP tag apart from WW'ers and spammers.

[Simsi]

Could this be a possible example of over-optimisation? Strikes me that there are a few things only SEO people would know about which may indicate to Google that a site is being optinised and raise a flag.

NOODP is one
Sitemaps is another
rel="nofollow" a third?

Wonder if its just worth avoiding things like this and acting more "layman", which after all is what Google ultimately wants I would imagine.

If it was me running an SE, and I wanted results based on good content, I'd be keen to catch those people trying to squeeze top results through optimisation and would probably lay a few subtle tracks down to flag who was paying attention. By "subtle" - I mean I wouldn't bomb people out, but I might add a "-1" to their algo total for a gradual process of down-grading that wouldn't alert them. Call me a cynic :)

[edited by: Simsi at 11:06 am (utc) on Aug. 29, 2006]