Yahoo! Search Blog: Yahoo! Search Support for 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags and Weather Update

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February 28, 2007

Yahoo! Search Support for 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags and Weather Update

Weï¿½re adding support for the Meta tag called ï¿½NOYDIRï¿½ that will complement the ï¿½NOODPï¿½ Meta tag, which we already support. If youï¿½re unfamiliar, the ï¿½NOODPï¿½ Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages. While we continue to pull from various sources to provide the best title and abstract for a given page in search results, we realize that webmasters may still want the ability to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory. So, as promised, weï¿½re providing support for ï¿½NOYDIRï¿½ which will recognize the following Meta tags on your pages:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

or
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

For pages with this tag, we will not use Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts for your URL in web search results. This will grant webmasters the ability to participate in the Yahoo! Directory Submit program and benefit from inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory, while maintaining control over URL titles and abstracts in search. This will not have any effect on the Yahoo! Directory Search experience, which will continue to use the Yahoo! Directory and title abstract information.

We are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change, and you should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. (Other regions will roll-out in the future.) This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.

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

Thanks!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

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Comments

bless you! I have been waiting so long for this as nobody would change our yahoo directory title no matter how many times I emailed!

Posted by: bwb | February 28, 2007 09:56 AM

This is excellent, thank you!

Posted by: Barry Schwartz | February 28, 2007 10:36 AM

Nice! Thanks for adding this folks.

Posted by: Frank Kilkelly | February 28, 2007 11:00 AM

Finally! Thank you!!!

But, as John asks above: Is it the singular "robot" or the plural "robots" as is standard in the tag? And if it's plural, will it work with other directives? As in:

META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOODP, NOYDIR"

Posted by: Brian M | February 28, 2007 11:42 AM

Hmmmm. Does this mean that a current search result that shows the Yahoo Directory listing will fall out of the serps? It will be interesting to see the results of this. I think I'll wait a bit before implementing.

Posted by: Richard Burckhardt | February 28, 2007 12:08 PM

It is the plural 'Robots' as is standard in the tag and yes it will work with the other directives for us. We will recognize all the tags in the following directive -

However, I cannot say how the other search engines will deal with the NOYDIR tag in that META directive.

Priyank

Posted by: Priyank Garg | February 28, 2007 12:10 PM

Oops, the META tag example I used didn't come through because I had the angular brackets. Let me try without the brackets.

We will recognize all the tags in the following directive or any version with some of the attributes removed -

META NAME='robots' CONTENT="noodp, noydir, noindex, noarchive, nofollow"

Posted by: Priyank Garg | February 28, 2007 12:13 PM

Many thanks, Priyank!

I'll try it with the NOYDIR as the last directive to give the other search engines a chance to extract the other directives first (and hope for the best). If I see a problem with this approach, I'll let you know.

Thanks again for such a prompt reply!

Posted by: Brian M | February 28, 2007 12:57 PM

It's about time that Yahoo! added this tag. Thanks for taking the time to add it, this actually means a lot to those of us who don't really like the directory info showing up in search results.

Posted by: Bill Hartzer | February 28, 2007 01:05 PM

Excellent move which I was waiting.

Many Thanks!!!

Posted by: Tilak | March 1, 2007 07:12 AM

Thanks to Yahoo team for doing this. I'm so tired of some listings for my clients on Yahoo that only have the Domainname.com on the Title, and the description is way too old.

Does this mean some SSP clients may pull their home page out?

Posted by: Mom Chan | March 1, 2007 09:14 AM

Thanks :)
I have just added the tag to the index page, I will let you know what happens in a few days after the dust settles.

Interesting update, by far the best spam removal algorithm I have ever seen on Yahoo.

The replacement for company - business spam is (Google ADSense Sites) Now if you can remove the pathetic Google web spam sites, the relevance should increase.

Posted by: Blog | March 2, 2007 11:48 AM

It's about time. I used to intentionally not submit some of my sites to the Yahoo Directory because I didn’t want my optimized title and description to get changed into a Yahoo editorial title.

Posted by: PPC Guy | March 16, 2007 02:14 PM

Thanks for the news Excellent.

Posted by: E Internet Index | May 8, 2007 12:51 AM

Good thing I stumbled on to this blog. I've been looking for exactly this! This is awesome! Thanks

Posted by: Chair Cover Rentals | May 8, 2007 11:21 PM

This is very useful feature and I already use it. Thanks.

Posted by: Exclusive Home Furnishings Catalog | May 16, 2007 12:44 PM

Thank you for this cool feature. We have been waiting for sometimes now!

Posted by: Richly Scented Soy Candles | May 16, 2007 12:45 PM

My site is dissappear from the search results..

Posted by: Sterling Silver CZ Jewelry | May 16, 2007 12:47 PM

This is awesome. Thanks.