NB. This post was first titled “Amazing finding at Google SERP - mark a New Era” - I was very excited while making the post and did not know about noodp tag. Thanks to Rishil and Frank (Gimmster). So I changed the title of the post. Here is the post:
I just couldn’t hold my breath when I discovered it:
I was doing some Google search for SEO content writer and found my other blog at the 7th place. I was excited as I never tried to go up for that key phrase. That was fun.
But it did not amaze me as much as the next one:
Just look at the description Google is showing under the link:
It says “SEO and related subjects from a skeptical, contrarian viewpoint.” And the most interesting thing is that, this line is not written anywhere in my blog.
This line is actually written by one of the DMOZ editors while accepting my listing at DMOZ. And just note another important thing - the anchor text of my link at DMOZ is “I have some doubts” - and the word “SEO content writer” is nowhere in that page. And still Google is taking that sentence.
So what does this mean?
- Google is smart enough to fetch content from anywhere! If Google starts doing this for everything, we got problems.
- Should we stop working on Meta Documents as Google no longer needs it (lol)!
- Remarks from human edited and authoritative websites are as important (something like comment from another webmaster is more important rather than what you are saying about yourself) as the links!
What say you guys? I will keep watching this and I will update the post if I find anything new.
6 responses so far ↓
1 rishil // May 4, 2008 at 8:22 pm
there are a bunch of tags you can use to get rid of that description - try the noopd tag - that will get google to avoid your dmoz desc and use your sites own
2 Gab Goldenberg // May 4, 2008 at 8:31 pm
If you care to share how you got into Dmoz to begin with, that’d be great ;).
3 seosos // May 4, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Very interesting!I have never heard about the noopd tag but now, thanks to your post and rishil comment I do…
4 Roy // May 5, 2008 at 2:48 am
Hi Rishil,
Thanks for the comment. I never knew about this noopd tag. I was just amazed to see why Google was doing this!!
Hi Gab,
It is not very tough to get listed at Dmoz
5 Gimmster // May 5, 2008 at 7:06 am
The returned result was in line with the search terms. When Google decides what to display it tries to macth the search term to the site description, the snippet of text it has of the page, and/or the dmoz description *and returns the one that provides the closest match*. You can force it to ignore the odp by using the noodp tag, but it’s still a crapshoot on whether you get the site desc or the snippet displayed - unless you don’t have a site description, in which case it’s entirely some vaguely related page content, or nothing at all.
6 Gimmster // May 5, 2008 at 7:37 am
Just checked, you don’t have a site desc on that site.
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