8 replies to this topic

[EddyGonzalez]

Hi there, I've searched Highrankings but I can't seem to find an answer to my hopefully simple question.

I'm working on a site whose home page snippet on Google's SERPs comes from Google Directory. I was under the assumption that GD uses Dmoz to provide data but the entry in Dmoz for my site is totally different. My question is can I use the same META tag used to remove Dmoz snippet, for GD?

cheers
eddy

PS. I couldn't use this funky wysiwyg posting thing in Firefox 3.6

[Jill]

I'm not sure I understand your post, but if you're saying that your DMOZ description is showing up as the description for your site in the Google search results for some search queries, then yes, you can remove that by using the  noodp tag[/hr].

[Scottie]

Offtopic- I'm not sure what "can't use the wysiwyg" means. _{I'm using} Firefox 3.6 and everything looks normal.

[qwerty]

I'm working on a site whose home page snippet on Google's SERPs comes from Google Directory. I was under the assumption that GD uses Dmoz to provide data but the entry in Dmoz for my site is totally different. My question is can I use the same META tag used to remove Dmoz snippet, for GD?

You're talking about the snippet and not the title, right? Is it the same snippet no matter what was searched on? Is the text from the snippet on the page?

In my experience, the Google snippet always comes from either the meta description, the on-page content, the ODP description, or the Yahoo Directory description. Is it possible the Google directory is getting its description from the Yahoo directory?

[EddyGonzalez]

Thanks for the replies.

Yeah I mean the snippet. The description in the 'Google Directory', www.google.com/dirhp is different from the description in 'Dmoz'. The description found on the Google search results for the brand name is the one from the 'Google Directory'.

I assumed that 'Google Directory' was a copy of DMoz but clearly not as they both have different descriptions for my site.

Can I still use the NOODP meta tag to remove the description coming from 'Google Directory'?

Scottie - when I try to add a reply or create a new topic, the WYSIWYG form entry doesn't work for me - I can only use the fast reply or use IE.

Eddy

[Randy]

Just to note something ...

Even if the Google Directory info is different from the DMOZ info, it could still be DMOZ stuff. As far as I know, and this was still correct as of August of 2009 and confirmed to me by a Google employee at the time, Google employees themselves cannot even directly edit data in their Google Directory. The info comes to them directly from a DMOZ RDF dump and they simply display what is in the RDF Dump.

The reason it can still be DMOZ data even if the info is different is that Google doesn't grab every new RDF Dump released by DMOZ. The most I've seen them update this is maybe 1 or 2 times per year. So if the DMOZ data has changed, or been changed by an editor there since the last time Google grabbed an RDF dump, the two will showing different info. Even if the origin of the info is the same.

Use noodp. This should suppress snippet and cause Google to pull it from the actual page content.

[qwerty]

I'm not sure about this. Even if the ODP description changed since Google last updated their copy of the directory, the question is whether, when Google is using an ODP description in a SERP, they're grabbing it from the ODP or from their own copy of ODP data. What does the description look like in Google's cached copy of the ODP page containing the listing?

[Randy]

Part of that I can answer since I have asked the question in the past Bob. I'll ask again, but I have no reason to suspect anything has changed from late last summer.

Here's the gist of it: Google uses the data from the RDF Dumps that they have available in their own system to populate the Google Directory data stream. They do not do any active querying of DMOZ with the most current data when using the data for their directory.

The more real time data from the current version of the DMOZ site is used for backlink calculations, as one might suspect.

[EddyGonzalez]

Really interesting comments, thanks!

The Google cache of the ODP listing is the same as the current version.

I'll recommend the noodp meta tag to be inserted to the site home page.

cheers
eddy