DMOZ snippet in SERP
-
I just added the author and publisher tags to my client's site and posted a dance class announcement on Google + with hashtags. When I did a test search on Google, they were showing up above the Place listings and the description under the title was taken from their DMOZ listing, not from the web site description. This is the first time I have seen this. Has anyone else seen DMOZ descriptions showing up in Google SERPs?
-
Hello David,
As Matt says, it does happen; but it has been quite a while since I saw them pull from DMOZ. I have seen everything else lately: Meta description drawn from content and not making sense when the Meta description on the site has nothing wrong with it. Title Tags that do not resemble the one from the sites, etc. Matt is also correct on the quick fix for blocking DMOZ or Open Directory Project (the odp in noodp). I would suggest if it is particularly disconcerting that you put the Meta tag in and then go into WMT and do a Fetch as Google on that page. While this is not the reason Fetch as Google was put in by Google, it often helps reindex quite quickly.
All the best, and good luck,
Robert
-
Hi David,
This does happen occasionally. The simple solution is to put a meta before the closing head () tag in to the template's code, as below:
This will block robots from showing the DMOZ directory description.
Hope that helps.
Matt
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I have never seen this in Google SERPs before?
What is this that I am seeing in the Google SERPs? It's a bank of 3 separate articles from one site, but they are grouped together like an organic listing. Checkout the link to see what I'm talking about http://imgur.com/xbUk1NG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Third Party Subdomain Slow Load Times Affect Our SERPs?
We have a third party subdomain that is not hosted on our server (smugmug.com gallery). It periodically has slow load times. The question is; does anybody know if the SERPs, or more specifically Google, would see that subdomain as our site? I want to gather insight into whether or not this might affect our results. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leslieevarts0 -
Why is this SERP displaying an incorrect URL for my homepage?
The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
The canonical and og URLs match.
The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path. And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/. What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?) We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long? [EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]0 -
Does Having A High PPC Bounce Rate Affect Organic SERPs?
Hi Mozzers. My website uses a landing page for Google Adwords traffic targeting keywords like HR Software, HR Systems etc. The design of the landing page is similar to our website but a key difference is that, being a landing page, we've removed the navigation (it is still possible to navigate to the main website by clicking on the logo). We've A/B tested this and found that by removing the navigation we get more people converting/signing up for the free trial of our service. We track conversions using Google Analytics. Depending on the keyword the conversion rate is between 2.5% and 5%. However, because we've removed the navigation the bounce rate is really high, circa 80% for our landing page compared to an average for our website of approx 40%. Would having such a high bounce rate harm our organic rankings for the rest of the website? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OctopusHR0 -
Pages Titles in SERPs - Wordpress Site
In Google SERPs we have several websites (built in wordpress) who's pages are being displayed without using the page title - is this google ignoring the page title or is there a problem in our code - also if this is google is it still taking notice of the page title to determine what content is on the page?I have read several articles on this but wondered if someone can advise - I can provide the URL if required.Also I wanted to 100% that our robots.txt is behaving its self.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
I'm having an exteremly hard time with SERPs despite my best efforts. Can someone help?
My site is www.drupalgeeks.org Our traffic is going up but our SERPS are not. We simply don't rank for any of our targeted keywords. I have covered nearly every white hat SEO strategy possible. Our site has a great social presence (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest), we write blogs regularly, and even guest blog. We have a YouTube channel, an RSS feed. We've cleaned up page speed times, set 301 redirects, checked for duplicate content. We use Bing and Google webmaster tools and have submitted a sitemap. We are indexed and webmaster tools see our keywords as relevant in our content. We have a robots.txt file configured properly. The only thing I can think of is that our services pages also display (as a truncated summary) on our homepage. Could this be considered duplicate content, and is this causing a problem? Is there anything else we can do? Or are we missing something vital? We thank you in advance for your help! Candice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candylotus0 -
NOINDEX content still showing in SERPS after 2 months
I have a website that was likely hit by Panda or some other algorithm change. The hit finally occurred in September of 2011. In December my developer set the following meta tag on all pages that do not have unique content: name="robots" content="NOINDEX" /> It's been 2 months now and I feel I've been patient, but Google is still showing 10,000+ pages when I do a search for site:http://www.mydomain.com I am looking for a quicker solution. Adding this many pages to the robots.txt does not seem like a sound option. The pages have been removed from the sitemap (for about a month now). I am trying to determine the best of the following options or find better options. 301 all the pages I want out of the index to a single URL based on the page type (location and product). The 301 worries me a bit because I'd have about 10,000 or so pages all 301ing to one or two URLs. However, I'd get some link juice to that page, right? Issue a HTTP 404 code on all the pages I want out of the index. The 404 code seems like the safest bet, but I am wondering if that will have a negative impact on my site with Google seeing 10,000+ 404 errors all of the sudden. Issue a HTTP 410 code on all pages I want out of the index. I've never used the 410 code and while most of those pages are never coming back, eventually I will bring a small percentage back online as I add fresh new content. This one scares me the most, but am interested if anyone has ever used a 410 code. Please advise and thanks for reading.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NormanNewsome0