Forum Moderators: open
The keywords in the new listing are inaccurate. An analogy would be:
Location Used Cars-Directory of some businesses offering car insurance.
This happened immediately following a disagreement with the meta editor at resource-zone. When will the description show up in the snippets on Google? I'm hoping it won't happen until the change makes its way to the Google Directory. Is there anything I can do to not have the description used in the snippets?
They will try to take a look at your site and write a description from that, which does not mean they will write the same you think your site is.
If your site is a garbled mess without much information you won't get much of a listing, but if you have a site with lots of content you might get a better listing.
By all means submit your site again with the new desc, but it's very unlikely it'll be changed since what webmasters submit usually sounds like a 5 sentence PR campaign without any care of what's actually on the site.
You could submit a request to the ODP for a new description. Dunno if there is much you can do.
What is in the ODP description really isn't that important.
I think "Directory of some businesses" sounds gawd awful. BTW this was never an issue in the report. I didn't even notice it much then. Only now when I look at the difference between the two listings.
The best advice is to work on the description for your web site, may be extend it for 2 or 3 sentences and than ask for an update.
[edited by: Cossack at 3:41 pm (utc) on June 8, 2003]
Is that days, weeks, months or years. vincevincevince, you should be working for Google;) They would even like that nick;)
Whilst it is true the time you can expect to wait is variable, I've had sites updated for description in just a few days. It all depends on how things are in your neck of the DMOZ :-)
BTW if you see that a meta editor changed something in your web site description - you are from the ODP or you get this information somehow - so if you fill an external abuse report - you may violate the ODP's guidelines for a second time.
Read the last few lines of: [google.com...]
>> If I violated any of their rules I couldn't care less. <<
That is quite a bad attitude you have there. Most, if not all, Meta editors care passionately about violations of the rules.
Most, if not all, Meta editors care passionately about violations of the rules.
I'm not asking how long to be in the Google directory. I'm asking if that is when my new ODP description will be the description that Google uses in the regular serps next to the word "Description:".
Umm. You got me thinking that I had seriously misread the question, then I noticed you originally wrote:
When will the description show up in the snippets on Google? I'm hoping it won't happen until the change makes its way to the Google Directory.
I have no idea when they might start using the snippets, but I do know how long it takes to get listed in the Google directory, which was implied by a part of the original question.
For some reason I'm thinking this was the case early this year when DOMZ was having problems with the dump. Maybe someone else can chime in, but I seem to remember new categories and descriptions being listed in the SERPs before Google finally updated its directory.
As for how you can get rid of this description - I'll guess the only way would be to have your listing removed from DMOZ.
How about returning a 404 error to the DMOZ bot? That might do the trick.
That wouldn't work. The site would indeed be tagged, but when an editor checked up on it, it would show up for the editor. There's no way to cloak submissions from editors with any effectiveness.
