NOODP: Prevent Google ODP descriptions

Do you sometimes ask yourself why Google displays a search result summary you neither have created (by using the meta description tag) nor can it be found on the page itself? This happens because Google then decides to use the description from it’s Open Directory Project (short: “ODP”) – most likely because in Google’s opinion this snippet is more relevant then the available meta data and / or the page content itself.

To prevent Google (and others like MSN for example) from displaying the ODP description simply use:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

Of course the content attribute value can be combined with other values like “index”, “nofollow” or whatever you like it to be.

Lately there were some rumors about ranking influences when using the “noodp” directive which at least I can not confirm. It won’t even make sense that a tag like this can affect the ranking because rankings are a computed first, then results snippets are – this has also been confirmed by Matt Cutts from Google.