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July 13, 2006
Google Adds Supports For NOODP Tag To Opt Out Of ODP Titles
Singing for joy! Google has now added support for the NOODP tag that MSN initiated on May 22nd of this year. Yes, Danny asked for this back in June, and now Google has granted our wish. If you have one of those pesky titles pulled from the ODP (dmoz.org) directory, don't fret it, just add the NOODP tag.
How do you do it? Just add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> to your page source. If you want to just exclude MSN use <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP"> if you just want to exclude Google use <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">.
Keep in mind, it takes time for Google to spider your pages and then determine if you do not want to use the ODP title. So if you add the tag today, it may take several weeks to have an impact.
Webmasters, this can have a huge affect on your organic traffic. If you have a poor ODP title and Google uses it in the results, by tweaking your title, your click-through rate from Google can potentially dramatically increase.
More details at Inside Google Sitemaps blog and the help section at Google.
Postscript: There is a bit of confusion that this tag only tells Google not to display the ODP description in the search results. This is not correct, Google will not display both the description and the title from the ODP in the Google search results with the implementation of this tag.
Posted by Barry Schwartz on July 13, 2006 1:19 PM
