Friday, 21 February 2014

Using the noodp Meta Tag

Trying to Control Titles

Recently we noticed Google appending text to our title tags which we did not want because we feel our titles are fine and its not Google's place to  modify our content.

It would appear that Google is appending our old brand name to the end of some of our titles and it makes some of them look really irrelevant.

For example if we did a care home related search it would show {OUR_TITLE} - The Nursing Homes Directory which look really bad if the search is care as it looks completely unrelated when in fact it is relevant.

Seems that Google is getting the appended text from the ODP (Demoz) listing we have which was still listing our old brand which was The Nursing Homes Directory.

In our attempt at trying to get these appendices removed from our titles we decided to use the googlebot meta tag and set the content to noodp which instructs Google not to use the ODP for extra information on our website
<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">
 
Currently this seems to have worked and most of our titles are back to normal for the affected SERPs. It is disappointing that Google has now decided to modify a websites content and I personally think they should not do it as I think the same with bubbling but that is another topic altogether.

Picture of the HTML markup of our document head
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