Open Directory Project Listings in the Search Results

Some of you may have noticed that some Google datacenters are showing DMOZ titles or descriptions for your site's listing in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The interesting thing about this is that it seems to change depending on what keyphrase you search for.

As an example, let's look at an informational giclee printing site, greatgiclee.com. We'll first do a search on Google for 'giclee' (no quotes):

http://64.233.167.99/search?hl=en&q=giclee&btnG=Google+Search

At the moment, the site is listed #7 and its title and description are:

Giclee
Technical and marketing advice on giclee printmaking for painters and photographers.

That is DMOZ information.


The second search is for 'giclee printing' (no quotes):

http://64.233.167.99/search?q=giclee+printing&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N

The #4 result shows greatgiclee.com's listing as:

Giclee
The aim is to educate the artist and enthusiast on fine art inkjet giclée printing/reproduction. I will detail how to get into giclee printing, ...

While the title is still from DMOZ, the description is a snippet of text from the home page. In my opinion, if Google feels that the DMOZ info is more relevant to a user's search phrase, it will display it instead of any on-site content.

That being said, wouldn't it be a good idea for webmasters to have some control over that, save for trying to get their DMOZ listing updated? Luckily, the folks at MSN have provided just that. You can now add the following meta tag to your pages and have your MSN Search listing not use DMOZ data:



Alternatively, this one can be used for all search engines, however no other engines have confirmed they support this yet: