Web Development Insight

For site owners included in ODP (Open Directory Project) the information is displayed as a default on search results. Google now gives webmasters the option to add a simple meta tag to their webpages to tell the search engine not to display their ODP (Open Directory Project) information:

Insert the following anywhere between the header tags:

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP" />

This works only for the google bot, so not every search engine who uses the ODP will immediately follow suit. Here’s the code that applies to all search engines who choose to use it:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP" />

I understand about 90% of the site descriptions contained in the ODP is outdated so using the out-of-date information is detrimental to the website owner.

Doug

Following Google’s footsteps, MSNBot, the Microsoft-sanctioned bot that crawls your website, can be identified. Live Search blog has published a way to see if the MSNBot is for real or not. A reverse DNS lookup is used to see if the bot’s IP address is the correct registered name. Then the host name is checked by doing a DNS lookup to see if it is coming from Live Search.

Doug