Opt Out of DMOZ Titles in MSN Search

Opting Out of Open Directory Listings for Webmasters

[rustybrick]

[blogs.msdn.com...]

What has bothered the webmasters previously is that when search engines preferred search result descriptions from dmoz.org, they did not empower webmasters to opt-out of those descriptions. This can be especially annoying if the descriptions from dmoz.org are outdated, or just plain inaccurate.

We had one customer who was frustrated because the ODP description of their site mentioned “favours” and was listed under Canada when their site was actually in the United States and was spelled as “favors”. All they wanted was a way to specify that MSN Search should use the description from their page instead of using ODP.

So what we did was introduce a new option at the page level - a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet. This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file.

So in your Web page you’d put

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

or

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

Cool.

[gniver]

I have been trying for years to have changes made to our ODP description and category, to no avail. The description has typos and misinformation and the category doesn't make sense.

I see that "The ODP is hosted and administered by Netscape Communication Corporation", and that the name DMOZ "reflects its loose association with Netscape's Mozilla project". Who controls DMOZ? Is there any better way to have a voice or to contact them?

[pageoneresults]

Who controls DMOZ?

The Editors.