LAST EDITED ON Nov-07-06 AT 03:39 AM (PST)
 
Google will often use ODP titles and descriptions for your sites and pages...

However, if you don't want to use ODP, then you can use this meta tag:

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

For more info, please refer to:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&topic=8523

Many tuelz, particularly TAGZ can be useful to add this metatag to pages.

Yahoo now also recognizes NOODP tag

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000368.html

"We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:

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

or

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

Hi Kurt

Is using ODP Titles and Descriptions a 'bad' thing?

This is a new one to me.

I suppose the only way to find out is to provide a mixture of 'NOODP' and no 'NOODP' meta tags, and see which fares better.

Or am I missing something here?

Your wisdom is, as ever, required again, O Wise One.

Looking forward to my enlightenment - LOL.

Kind regards

Ian

>Hi Kurt
>
>Is using ODP Titles and Descriptions a 'bad' thing?
>
>This is a new one to me.
>
>I suppose the only way to find out is to provide a mixture
>of 'NOODP' and no 'NOODP' meta tags, and see which fares
>better.
>
>Or am I missing something here?
>
>Your wisdom is, as ever, required again, O Wise One.
>
>Looking forward to my enlightenment - LOL.
>

Hey Ian,

I'm not sure there really is a "deep" answer, as with this post I'm just the "messenger", so to speak.

I will say, if you're getting traffic, don't change a thing.

I'd also be inclined to say that if you have decent rankings but aren't getting clicks, you may want to change this.

But this first thing to ask is, are your pages even listed in ODP? If not, you'd be better off trying to get them listed instead of using the NOODP.