Meta Elements: A Field Guide - Meta Element: NOODP, NOYDIR, and Robots-NoContent

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Google, Yahoo, and MSN sometimes use titles and abstracts from the Open Directory Project (also known as ODP) for titles and descriptions when returning a results page. To stop this from occurring, the three companies began using "NOODP" as a new value for the robots meta tag element. Below is how you would write the code:

<Meta Name="Robots" Content="NOODP">

If you would like to block this from happening on just one of the sites, you could use one of the following codes:

Google:

<Meta Name="GOOGLEBOT" Content="NOODP">

MSN and Live Search:

<Meta Name="msnbot" Content="NOODP">

Yahoo:

<Meta Name="Slurp" Content="NOODP">

In addition, Yahoo has been known to use its own Yahoo Directory content next to the ODP data. To stop this, simply use these tags:

<Meta Name="ROBOTS" Content="NOYDIR">

<Meta Name="Slurp" Content="NOYDIR">

And finally, Robots-NoContent is a new attribute and value created by Yahoo in May of 2007 that tells the Yahoo engine to ignore and not index the content in a given tag. For instance, if you have a paragraph you do not want to be indexed, you can do so in the following manner:

<p class="robots-nocontent"> We attack tonight muahahaha! </P>

Note that this simply means Yahoo will not index that specific paragraph; other search engines will simply laugh at you and put all your well laid plans in plain view.

Conclusion

This is by no means a complete list of meta elements. For instance, we did not cover meta-refresh here or the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"/> (I will, however, cover that in a later article). But these are the basics, and the majority that you will encounter. Thanks for reading and look for more to come!

Till then...

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Comments On: Meta Elements: A Field Guide

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