Although this is an actual serious SEO issue, I find this humorous.

What is NOODP?

As a background first about NOODP, this is a meta tag used to exclude the description text displayed by search engines where the descriptions are pulled from the Open Directory Project.

I had a friend that onced asked me over the phone: “What the f**k is the Open Directory Project? I cannot find it, is it www.opendirectoryproject.net?” *LOL*

For noob SEO, the Open Directory Project or ODP is www.dmoz.org. It is one the directory that has been out there in the very early days of the Internet and is human edited so search engines trust ODP’s credibility. Since the sites submitted to ODP that get approved and listed, are considered highly credible, sometimes search engines use the description from ODP and is displayed in the search engine results.

NOODP is a meta tag in this format:

<meta name="Robots" Content="NOODP">

This is used to exclude the ODP description pulled from ODP. I first heard about this from Jenstar’s interview with DaveN on the online program Click This. Where they mentioned the tag was made by MSN and Google has recently announced the support for it.

NOODP Does not only not work on Google, it even does the opposite!

I find this funny actually. A friend of mine, Mishon Tuknov whom I used to work with in a another company told me about it and wrote about it in the DP community. This is funny, the NOODP on Google is actually making Google actually use the ODP descriptions. It is working like a YESODP. *LOL*

Introduction

It may not be immediately visible at first, but even multimedia practitioners have to learn a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics as they are at times required to create websites for their clients and employers. Search Engine Optimization is a term used for methods of putting a website into favourable spots in search results. Note that SEO techniques can come in different flavours and that some of these are not exactly examples of fair play. Often people hear of Google Bombs and Spamdexes, a couple of well-known methods that are not particularly liked by companies that run search engine services. These will not be covered here. The author intends this article to be a quick brief guide for multimedia practitioners on SEO’s, as there seems to be a lack of sources regarding the topic for this kind of audience. (I’m a multimedia student who has recently become interested in SEO’s.)

(more…)