My SERP description changes from mine to DMOZ depending on search

i.e. "mycompany" or "my company"

[internetheaven]

If I search for "mycompanyname" Google uses the meta description. If I search for "my company name" google uses the DMOZ description (which, of course, is awful).

I have a company name that is searched for either way like "phones4u" or "additionsdirect".

[Quadrille]

As visitors are much more likely to search for "my company name" than "mycompanyname" Google, then Google and the ODP have probably got it right.

Google tries to match the search term with the meta description, or the ODP description, or a snippet (though not necessarily in that order).

While you may search for "mycompanyname", in most cases, that is not going to be a favored term for potential visitors (maybe you are an exception to that?).

And it's their needs you want to anticipate with your tags and content - and ODP always thinks of the visitor needs rather than webmaster's.

[willybfriendly]

Kind of like this:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I hope its temporary. I am seeing the directory description for widgets (plural) and site <title> description for widget (singular) and have been for a while now.

WBF

[piconsulting]

I found the same until this morning. It seems that they've stopped using the DMOZ company name and description, since we implemented the NOODP tag.

[blaketar]

Any updates or other comments on this situation?

I am noticing that when I do a search for: www.mydomain.com and google uses the DMOZ title my site:www.mydomain.com page results are EXTREMELY low count and continue to decline (at the lowest 54000 to 593)!

On the flip side when I see google using my Home Page title the site: command returns more results and more traffic and the page count continues to climb until the revert back to the DMOZ title when pages start dropping out.

There must be some association here?

Domain/site Age: 2 years
Incoming Links: (Yahoo Reports) 2780

[annej]

I hadn't looked for a while and notice today that when I search on my top search word most data centers are using the DMOZ title. I'm not complaining though as on those data centers my homepage is ranked #4 instead of #5.

Is this some sort of mini update?

[annej]

Interesting, now I'm seeing something differentnow. Sometimes the DMOZ title has my description and visa versa. I wonder if they are experimenting with using any of the four possiblities depending on the search.

[reseller]

At this moment, when run site: operator, the only DCs that show my "real" title are the followings:

[64.233.189.104...]

[66.102.9.99...]
[66.102.9.104...]

[66.102.11.99...]
[66.102.11.104...]

The rest of DCs are showing DMOZ title.

[annej]

Reseller, I know you watch all the trends. Do you think they might be going to using DMOZ in most cases or are they just experimenting around?

[PlanetTokyo]

I wish it it were just matter of showing either my description or the DMOZ description.

This morning I noticed that SERPS for a specific phrase are listing one of my pages, but using text from a third party site as the description. The text in question actually appears on my page as a trackback - but it's only one of several. I'm baffled by how Google picked this to be the description for the page.

[piconsulting]

Here's my quick uopdate:

Using mcdar, I searched for mydomainname and it displays the <title> and meta description.

If I search for My Company Name is shows a double listing. The first page is the homepage with the <title> and meta description, the indented listing shows DMOZ data.

Homepage was cached 6/21 and the other page was cached 6/17.

There are now only 3 DCs which are displaying the DMOZ data for both the homepage and second listing.

I implemented the noodp meta tag on 6/14 at which point all but 17 DCs were using the DMOZ data.