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Why Yahoo NOYDIR and Google NOODP tag

One of the drawbacks of Yahoo!’s business directory in the past has been that your site’s directory description gets used as your site’s description in the SERPs.

Why is this a problem? Because it can kill your click-through
traffic. Those descriptions are assigned by directory editors, and
aren’t necessarily written to generate the most click-through traffic
in the SERPs. Webmasters would rather have more control over what shows
up in those search results and they were getting upset when they paid big money to be listed in Yahoo!’s directory, only to have there description of their Website entry in the search results changed.

To its credit, Yahoo! listened to complaints and announced recently that it’s released a tag to prevent this from happening. Use the NOYDIR tag in your pages, and Yahoo! won’t use your directory description in its search results. Here’s how it works:

With in the <head></head> tag of your HTML code, put in the following:

meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR”

This code will prevent Yahoo! from using your Yahoo directory description in its search engine results.

Google did the same thing earlier when it released its NOODP tag. The DMOZ directory listings were be used in the Google search results in some cases, and the NOODP
tag gave webmasters a way to opt out. If you have a listing in DMOZ,
you can use this code to prevent your DMOZ description from showing up
in your search results.

Put the following with in the <head></head> tag in the HTML code in your page.

meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”

So if you take these precautions, what shows up in your SERPs should
be based on your meta description. Using the new code won’t affect any
benefits you get from the Yahoo! directory in terms of ranking weight
and link juice.