The Yahoo! Search Blog announced support of the NOODP tag, which enables site owners to tell Yahoo! to not display the ODP title and description in the Yahoo! search results. This is a direct response from webmasters communicating in the forums that they want Yahoo! to support it. In addition, on October 10th, on the Search Pulse, I got confirmation Yahoo! To Add NOODP Tag Support But Not No-Yahoo-Directory Tag Support from Tim Mayer. Tim and I spoke on the 6th edition where he promised it within weeks, and it is now done.
We strive to show the most useful information in search results. We look at multiple sources for titles and abstracts, including page content, anchor text in the links to a page, Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP); and we pick the best based on our algorithms. You might have seen some of the features that we have implemented with this approach, such as quick links for Wikipedia, and local business data. However, some webmasters have had issues with titles and abstracts in ODP and have adopted the 'NOODP' META tag to indicate to search engines not to use them. As Tim Mayer promised a few days earlier talking to Barry Schwartz on The Pulse, we are launching support for this tag in tonight's weather update.We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"
or
META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP"
If we find any of these tags on your page, we will not consider ODP titles or abstracts as candidates for your URL in search results. We are reindexing content on the web to launch this change. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index that are typical of weather updates.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.
