Recently The Big 3 of Search: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, all made great posts on their blogs clearing up exactly how their search engines all respond to robots protocol commands. Now if you dismissed this as old-hat ‘web 1.0′ tech knowledge then you might have missed a couple of interesting tidbits. Within all the other, better known robots protocols were:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir”>

and

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

What do these tags do and why are they important for a complete SEO campaign?

When displaying search results, search engines grab a description of the site called the snippet, highlighted here:

Normally drawn from the Meta Description field, this snippet is increasingly being sourced from other areas by search engines. This can be troublesome as it prevents site owners from putting forward their best sales pitch, and best optimized text where a direct appeal to users counts the most: in the search engine results.

Because of the level of review and trusted status of the ODP / Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory, descriptions of a site will often be taken from these sites, if it is present. Although a site owner has some control over the site description these two directories use, it can often be a long and winding process to change it.

To avoid this, adding the following code:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

to your website will tell search engines specifically not to use the difficult-to-change descriptions on those sites, and instead use the carefully crafted text in your meta description field.

This will help your site, or your clients’ sites present their best face to the public, draw more attention, and get more conversions – which makes everybody happy!