Yahoo introduce NOYDIR Meta tag to compliment NOODP
Yahoo! today announced support for a new <meta> tag which allows you to opt out of having Yahoo! directory snippets appearing under your natural search results in Yahoo! search. Up until now site owners had no control over whether the snippet text was taken from the Yahoo! directory or from <meta name=”description” … > tags within their sites pages.
This had become an increasing problem for sites that established their listings in the Yahoo! directory some time ago, leading to (undesired) out of date text appearing with their Yahoo! search results. For an example of this, check out the search results for dabs.com:
The phrase “Sells IT and Technology Products” is from Dabs Yahoo! directory listing and was set up years ago. I’ll be getting the NOYDIR tag in place on the dabs site soon so that it gets the text from the meta description instead.
To make use of this new tag just add one of the following to the <head> area of your pages and wait for Slurp to visit your site:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
or
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
update:
This Search Engine Roundtable post makes a good point about the NOYDIR tag, it will have zero impact on your search rankings. The changes this tag allows are purely cosmetic allowing you more control over snippet text, however nicer snippets means more click throughs which means higher conversion rates - got it?
Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, NOYDIR, Slurp
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