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October 24, 2006

Yahoo! Search Weather Update and Support for 'NOODP'

We strive to show the most useful information in search results. We look at multiple sources for titles and abstracts, including page content, anchor text in the links to a page, Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP); and we pick the best based on our algorithms. You might have seen some of the features that we have implemented with this approach, such as quick links for Wikipedia, and local business data. However, some webmasters have had issues with titles and abstracts in ODP and have adopted the 'NOODP' META tag to indicate to search engines not to use them. As Tim Mayer promised a few days earlier talking to Barry Schwartz on The Pulse, we are launching support for this tag in tonight's weather update.


We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

or

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">

If we find any of these tags on your page, we will not consider ODP titles or abstracts as candidates for your URL in search results. We are reindexing content on the web to launch this change. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index that are typical of weather updates.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Site Explorer forum or refer to our webmaster resources page.

Thanks!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

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Comments

Priyank,

Thanks for the heads up and the update. You all are doing a great job. I cant wait (fingers crossed) on what tomorrow will bring in regards to the update.

Cheers.

Posted by: Rob | October 24, 2006 07:57 PM

Looks like you are doing updates more frequently. I still wonder why there are major shifts at specific points in time. Seems like old technology.

Posted by: Glenn | October 25, 2006 05:25 AM

The new index is an absolute mess, more spam than I have seen in ages.

Posted by: Deborah | October 25, 2006 05:57 AM

Please make a similar tag for not considering Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts.

Posted by: Renton | October 26, 2006 05:11 AM

Thanks for doing this!

I'd like to second Renton, please give us the same for Yahoo! Directory stuff.

Posted by: Ian | October 26, 2006 06:16 AM

I'll third Renton's statement! A no Yahoo Directory tag would be great.

Posted by: Ryan | October 26, 2006 09:32 AM

I will take the 5th on this one :)

Please make a similar tag for not considering Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts.

Posted by: Blog | October 26, 2006 03:40 PM

Search results are very irrelevant. When you search for "new cars", #9 is a website from UK, #10 is New Volkswagen Cars. There are double listings too. #11 is the same website as #10.
For keyword "automotive", the brand name is #20.

Posted by: Peter | October 27, 2006 12:50 PM

We lost our ODP listing.

Our site was hijacked and since then we have not been able to get back into the ODP listings.

We also lost our top rankings in Yahoo for all types of invitations right after we lost our ODP listings.

We have tried for several months to get back into the ODP by listing the site about every 2 months and have not been successful.

Where can I go from here?
Thanks
Michael

Posted by: Michael | October 30, 2006 05:47 PM

will adding the NOODP hinder my sites ranking?

Posted by: Holly | November 6, 2006 06:59 AM

What Does this NOODP do?
one more question,
How can we know in our site was hijacke.

Thanks you help and time.

Regards

Rafael

Posted by: Rafael | November 7, 2006 06:21 AM

Any word on the No Yahoo Directory tag? I know it's been in the works for a while, but haven't heard anything about it lately.

Can we look forward to it soon?

Richard

Posted by: Richard Burckhardt | January 7, 2007 10:04 AM

I'm also curious as to whether we will see the No Yahoo Directory tag soon.

Posted by: Victor | January 9, 2007 01:47 AM

NOODP prevents search engines from using the Title and Description of a site from Dmoz.org when showing results for a particular search query.

or

I am also very much looking forward to the NO Yahoo Directory tag !!

Posted by: Png | January 19, 2007 11:06 PM

Thanks Rashmi for a great post! We've quoted you at Tyner Blain in our post, Software testing series: Organizing a test suite with tags part one. Thanks for helping us with our research and inspiring some ideation!

Posted by: güzeller galerisi | April 6, 2007 03:11 PM

Thanks!

Posted by: sohbet | April 6, 2007 03:12 PM

I'll third Renton's statement! A no Yahoo Directory tag would be great.

Posted by: mynet sohbet | April 6, 2007 03:16 PM