DMOZ Descriptions for your Web Site

Disclaimer: For most web masters, this may be old news. But, there are some out there that still do not know this, so that is the reason for this post.

If you are not familiar with DMOZ (Open Directory Project), I will not bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that DMOZ was a great idea at the beginning. Actual people reviewing the submitted web sites and the web site going to the correct category. Awesome! No room for “made for Adsense” web sites! Love it.

However, the problems with DMOZ have been widely announced and web masters have moved on to greener SEO pastures, for the most part I think.

At any rate, when designing a web site, you as the webmaster can stipulate that you want YOUR carefully crafted web site description to show up in the Search Engine Results as opposed to allowing the Search Engine to grab the DMOZ description. Just make sure you add the NOODP META tag to your web site code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

This will tell the SE to use your description as it appears in your META description tag as opposed to the sometimes poorly written DMOZ description.

It will take some time (possibly several weeks) for the Search Engine to update the results, so be patient. If you have ever submitted to DMOZ, you should be familiar with “patience” ;).