Search Engines Borrowing Page Titles from Directories

May 22nd, 2006 by Chris

I’ve heard this complaint dozens of times. Someone has a pretty nice search engine ranking except instead of using the webmaster’s carefully selected title tag as the title for the listing the search engine pulls one from a directory that was done by an editor who might not be the most gifted copywriter. Now sure, for directory based searches this is alright, but I’m talking about a normal search engine just borrowing some directory data.

Google for instance will borrow from DMOZ, Yahoo from Yahoo (duh), and MSN used to borrow from LookSmart/Zeal back when they used them, now they’ll borrow from DMOZ.

Well MSN just launched a new meta tag that allows webmasters to opt out of such a service.

Simply add <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”> to your header and you will no longer have an directory title with your MSN listing. Using this tag will not affect your actual listing in the directory, just what information is used to generate your listing in the SERP.

One can hope this meta tag goes the way of rel=nofollow and ends up being adopted by all engines after being launched by just one.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization » by: Chris

3 Responses to “Search Engines Borrowing Page Titles from Directories”

anty Says:
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:13 am
I never recognized this behaviour in search engine results, but I think SEs should take your site data for default, only if you don’t have a title tag they should take content from an archive.
mobilebadboy Says:
May 29th, 2006 at 12:10 am
Yahoo has done this with one of my sites for a long time (just about the only site I have listed in their directory). Annoys me to no end. I hope they all, as you, adopt this tag.
Ken Barbalace Says:
July 11th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Out of curiousity, how well does stacking up these meta robots work?

Can we use the following at the same time?
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”ALL”>