Googlebot not respecting NOODP

[hermosa]

I have this tag on my index.html page:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">

and yet Google STILL displays the DMOZ title, etc. sometimes. As a result, my site is bouncing around in the SERPS. Sometimes it is at position 3 sometimes it is on the second page. Also, I notice when I checked it on my computer, the DMOZ information was showing. When I did the search from an internet cafe on the same day, my proper Title and meta tags were showing.

Anyone else having this problem? What does it mean? Is this a penalty of some kind. How can I fix it? My site is about 12 years old.

[tedster]

As a result, my site is bouncing around in the SERPS.

Do you mean that your rankings are only bouncing around when the ODP information is displayed?

[hermosa]

Yes when the ODP title and description are visible, the site appears on page 2 in the SERPS. When my own site title and tags are visible, I rank 3 in the SERPS.

[tedster]

This sounds something like what can happen when there is a server problem for the website and Google cannot access it. Then there follows a period where Google's data canters are not coordinated, some showing the oldeer information and some showing the newer.

Did you have a recent server problem? And does Google report that they found any crawl errors when you look into Webmaster Tools?

My feeling right now is that whatever caused this, it will clear up for you as long as your server keeps talking with googlebot.

[hermosa]

It looks like they weren't able to access my index page on August 1st. I was doing a lot of work on the site and perhaps googlebot came by when I was doing some uploading. They do have a more recent cache for me. I know that one of my pages dropped out for a day and the it came back to number 1 position for the relevant keyword. Maybe I should just leave the site alone and not make any more changes for a bit.

[hermosa]

My actual page title and description seem to be back and working okay now.

[HuskyPup]

I had a similar problem with Dmoz, someone there had changed the company name example.com to example.biz (which I do own) and the index page went all over the place and the site was semi-hit with the -950!

As soon as I realised what had happened I put in a request and, surprisingly, it was rectified very quickly and G put me back to my previous position on the next spidering.

I'm still confused as to how it was pointed at example.biz!

[g1smd]

If you have multiple domains for the same business, someone has to make a decision as to which is the most authoritative because you only get one listing. That decision may not be in line with your expectations.