Again, this information is excerpted from one of Matt Cutts video articles - someone wrote in because they were noticing that at times the description that Google was using for their site in search results was actually the description of their site in the Open Directory Project - instead of the meta description tag for that page.
Matt explained that if the description of the site in dmoz was more relevant to the search performed then Google would use that description as it is a better fit for the user doing the searching and I guess this would help to drive traffic to your site.
However, there is a way of getting around this behaviour by using the NOODP tag in the header of your document - this basically informs Google not to use the description in dmoz at all, ever.
To stop all robots from using the noodp tag:
You can also specify for specific search engines such as…
Not sure about this last one, but I found a list of bots which may prove useful. I’m sure both MSN and Google support this tag (in fact MSN was first, possibly in response to this article), unsure about Yahoo! at this point.
Profile: Frank has been programming for the web using PHP, Javascript and numerous libraries and frameworks for the past 5 years. More articles.
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