Control your web site description

MSN announced this week a new META tag that will allow webmasters to have more control over their site description in search engine results pages (SERPs). Often the SERPs will display a site description (or "snippet") directly from The Open Directory Project (aka ODP or DMOZ), a volunteer-built guide to the web. Because DMOZ uses human editors, the snippets can often be several years out of date or otherwise inaccurate.

The problem was the search engines often displayed these descriptions whether you wanted them to or not. So despite your well-crafted META Description tag or optimized content, the search engines still choose DMOZ’s description over yours.

But now you have a choice. If you don’t like your DMOZ description, enter the following META tag into the head of your default site homepage.

< name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">*
or
< name="msnbot" content="NOODP">*

*remove the spaces after <>

So far, MSN is the only engine to support this tag, but others may follow. And remember, it may take a few days (weeks, etc.) for the spiders to crawl your page and update the engine’s cache.