A New Webmasters Tool

Every webmaster worth their salt has used Meta tags. The most common Meta tags used in web site design are the “keywords” and “description” Meta tag. Some of the more advanced webmasters have learned to use others to protect their copyright, or to specify the use of a different character set.

The robot.txt file and the robots Meta tag work together to give instructions to the search engine robots in the process of indexing your website. While this gives you control over which robots access your site, webmasters had very little control over how the information the search engine robots retrieved would be used to represent their website in the search engine listings.

Many webmasters have submitted their sites to a large variety of search engines, directories and web sites as reciprocal links all with different descriptions; some dating to the first design of the website which are no longer relevant. This presented webmasters with a frustrating situation; in many cases it was almost impossible to change a directory listing.

Recently one of the largest search engines announced that they would begin to support the new method tag called “NOYDIR”, in addition to the “NOODP” Meta tag that is currently supported by all major search engines.

The difference here is that these Meta tags gives webmasters more flexibility over what text is displayed in their search engine listing from the variety of sources a search engine robot uses to create it.

One of the major sources that search engine robots consult is the Open Directory Project (ODP) listings, which uses the abstracts created by their human editors. However in many cases a webmaster may not want the titles and descriptions used by ODP In the search engine results listing pages.

While using human editors to review and include web sites in their directory has many advantages, a webmaster tends to see the web site differently when creating a description using a perspective that is contrary to that of a human editor. The other problem is that many times the information included in this directory is not updated on a regular basis to reflect the changes in the website design or content.

It was in response to webmasters discontent with the ODP directory title and abstract in the search results that led to the creation of the “NOODP” tag; to signal the search engine robots that this type of directory title and description should not be used.

Yahoo developed the “NOYDIR” tag for its search engine robot to do the same thing. The meta tag is placed in head section of your web page and constructed in this manner:

When the robots from Yahoo see this Meta tag, they will not include Yahoo’s directory description for your web site in the organic search results.
This can be followed by the Meta tag for the ODP:

Using these two new Meta tags gives you the webmaster more control in managing which information is listed in the search engine result pages by the robots. When Yahoo sends the robot to your site and you have the meta tags described above it will use the title and the description that you’ve stated on your web pages, instead of using their abstract and title, information retrieved from the Open Directory Description or both. You can also write this Meta tag to include both Yahoo and ODP description exclusions, in this manner:

Using these new Meta tags will not affect your links from Yahoo or the Open Directory Project. Once you have added these two new Meta tags to your web pages makes sure you take the time to review their guidelines and optimize your web pages to Yahoo search engine standards to maximize its benefits. Although Yahoo is number two in the search engine popularity polls, smart webmasters optimize their web sites for both.

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