It looks like MSN Search is taking the lead when it comes to ignoring Open Directory descriptions in search results. For those of you who don't know, Open Directory descriptions are human-edited descriptions that were once very popular. Having a link with the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org use to give you a big boost in the search engine results, but I don't that is the case anymore. The editors were volunteers and many editors eventually lost interest. As a result, many web sites have descriptions in the ODP that are old or inaccurate.
If interest in the ODP isn't what it use to be, what's the big deal? Well, the problem is that search engines like MSN and Google use the Open Directory descriptions in the search results. Sometimes theses descriptions override the newer, more accurate descriptions supplied by webmasters.
Now, by using a new meta tag at the page level, webmasters can tell the MSN search bot to ignore the DMOZ site description. The tags look like this:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
or
<META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">
The first tag is a generic tag for all search engines to ignore the DMOZ description. The second tag tells just MSN to ignore DMOZ. Currently, MSN is the only search engine to support the new tag so both tags produce the same results right now. Hopefully, Google and Yahoo will support this new tag as well.
According to the post, the search results descriptions will not change immediately. The crawlers have to re-crawl your site first.
What I don't understand is why this couldn't have been implemented as part of the robot.txt file (in addition to meta tags). If I have 30,000 static web pages (with no header includes), it could take a long time to add the new meta tag on each page. Luckily, I am using header includes on my 30,000-page site.
