With the launch of Bing, many website owners have discovered that the description of their site is not all it should be.
Whilst, as most site owners understand, the description on Google is taken from the Meta Description tag, Bing has taken the decision to extract the information from their listing in the Open Directory (DMOZ).
In fact, this is not new; MSN Search and Live Search both did this but with the publicity the newly named search engine is receiving along with its growing popularity among users, this issue has gained more focus.
For an example, see Bing’s description of their colossal competitor Google:
To ensure that the description of your site on Bing is how you would like it to read, the following Tag needs to be introduced onto your page:
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
Simply, this tells the MSNBOT not to grab its content from the OPD and select your Meta description instead.
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[...] post: Bing using DMOZ Description Comments [...]
I was wondering why Bing's listings were so much different from that of Google or the other major search engines. Good to know!
We have always added in our tags. Many SE’s will use DMOZ, not just Bing.
It looks like Bing has already “fixed” this. They are currently showing the description from the pages meta tag, not the description at DMOZ.org
DMOZ sucks!