Just Say NO to ODP Titles in MSN Search Results!

May 25th, 2006

All I have to say it is about time a search engine gave webmasters the option to not display the title from Open Directorys listing in the search results and MSN is the first (hopefully not the last either). C'mon Google and Yahoo, its your move now.

This is a bit of an issue, especially with Google displaying ODP titles and the same with Yahoo and it tends to show the title and description as well. Sometimes we do not get the best or most accurate title and description that we would like to display for our main page on our site, plus services and focus of a website does change, and have you ever tried to get an updated listing in ODP? Its surely not an easy task getting it done in a timely matter.

Ok, so all you need to do is place one of the two meta tags between your opening and closing head tags in the coding of your website.

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

I must note that as of writing this (Thursday May 25th), when checking MSN results, the title showing is the actual title from the page and not the title from Open Directory, which is the company name, but it is pulling the description from Open Directory. This is one of the main things I would like changed and I'm anxiously awaiting.

Update: June 8th, 2006

As of June 06, 2006, yes 06.06.06, MSN has updated the title and description for my listing and no longer showing the ODP information.

This is a great move for MSN. You can find the official release here.

Gerard Manning
Canadian Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning Search Marketing