Prevent Search Engines from Using Information from Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

The well known Open Directory project,  DMOZ is an open content directory of world wide web links. DMOZ is owned by Netscape and have a large community of volunteer editors who takes care and manage DMOZ. While displaying the snippets by Google, while performing a search, the content is taken either from the Meta description tag of the web page or from the description that is provided in the DMOZ. If Google doesn’t find the entry of that website in DMOZ, it also takes relevant content from the page content.

There are certain instances when a particular page on the website and the DMOZ description for that website does not match. i.e the DMOZ content is not relevant to a particular page on the website. In this case if the DMOZ description is provided for that particular page on Google search, the click through ratio may decrease due to the irrelevancy in the snippets provided. Here as a website owner, one has to make sure that for that particular page, the search engine does not display the snippets from DMOZ entry. So here one must make necessary steps to prevent the search engine from taking the description from DMOZ.

The best way to prevent the search engines from using the description from DMOZ is by adding a special meta tag to the web pages. The code for preventing all the search engines from taking description from DMOZ is given below.

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”>

If you want to prevent only Google bot from using the information from DMOZ, you can give the below given code.

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”NOODP”>

Similarly you can also mention other search engine bot’s name to prevent them from using this information. It may take some time before this code starts working for you.