Google announced this morning that they are no longer supporting using the description and title from DMOZ, the Open Directory Project. Why? Well, it officially closed down a few months ago. So for Google to use titles and descriptions from a service that is no longer updated is update makes little sense.
In fact, Google should have probably dropped support years ago because DMOZ was not that good at keeping their links updated. I guess, this is one of the reasons DMOZ closed down.
Google wrote:
With DMOZ now closed, we've stopped using its listings for snippeting, so it's a lot more important that webmasters provide good meta descriptions, if adding more content to the page is not an option.
What will happen with the "NOODP" robots directive? Google said "with DMOZ (ODP) closed, we stopped relying on its data and thus the NOODP directive is already no-op."
So Google really is depending a lot of the web page itself to make the description, so they want you to read this help document on how to help Google tailor your snippets.
Google began supporting the noodp directive back in 2006 and used DMOZ descriptions since before that. So this is an historic moment.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
