Directory Titles in Search Results – No More
From Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Land:
Sometimes pages are listed in both Yahoo’s crawler-based search results and within its human-compiled directory, the Yahoo Directory. In those cases, Yahoo usually replaces the title and description of a web page in the crawler-based results with the information from the Yahoo Directory. Yahoo has operated this way for as long as I can remember — that’s over a decade 
Now there’s a solution. By inserting this meta tag on any page:
You can ensure that Yahoo will not use a directory description it might have for that page. NOTE: The Yahoo Search Blog currently has a typo, saying “name=robot” rather that name=”robots” that’s long been used.
The first tag tells any spider that wants to recognize the tag not to use a Yahoo Directory title or description. Of course, no other spiders do that — but Yahoo’s just building in some protection should that come up in the future. The second tag specifically tells the Yahoo spider not to use the information.
So, what does this mean? Well, it’s a step in the right direction, since it allows you to add this tag and make the change you want (i.e., not having directory information used in search results – since the directory info probably isn’t current anymore). However, wouldn’t it be great if they just didn’t do it, and we could avoid having to add code to our pages.
To Your Success,
Jennifer Horowitz – Director of Marketing –
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