MSN Search Adds New Metatag Allowing Sites to Opt Out of default use of ODP Data

[mandy]

MSN Search has added a new metatag that allows webmasters to indicate to the MSN Crawler that they don't want MSN to use the ODP Directory's description of their site:

Opting Out of Open Directory Listings for Webmasters

Just to give some background, the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org is a repository of millions of human-edited descriptions...

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 This can be especially annoying if the descriptions from dmoz.org are outdated, or just plain inaccurate.

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">

full blog entry: http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/...03917.aspx

[valleygirl]

It doesn't work with Google or Yahoo.