Just a few minutes ago, colleague Laura Beatty here at BusinessOnLine notices something on Yahoo, and says Yahoo is not showing the correct title tag. I took at look at it searching BusinessOL and yup, it does look different.
Yahoo Title different from the HTML title tag.
After looking at it deeper, of course the first think we checked was Yahoo Directory since Yahoo is already known to do this, in the same way how Google and Bing sometimes pull titles from DMOZ, but they are still different.
BusinessOnLine Yahoo Directory Title
It’s not Yahoo Directory, it’s not the title tag, so it must be DMOZ?
BusinessOL Title on DMOZ
So far, it does look like the title is pulled from DMOZ aka the ODP. Even if we had the NOODP, NOYDIR tags in there for a very long time.
NOODP and NOYDIR Meta Tags are included in the BusinessOL source code.
I am not sure if I have read anywhere that Yahoo pulls titles from DMOZ, all I know is it pulls from Yahoo Directory. And if this is indeed pulling from DMOZ, it is not following the NOODP tag which I believe it should. Is Yahoo broken? Well I’m not really surprised right now. In the previous SMX East, Yahoo announced they no longer read the Meta Keywords tags, and just after a few weeks, Danny proves them wrong.
Has anyone else been seeing the same observations? We’d be glad to hear from you also if you are seeing the same thing, tell us about it.
<guessing>Benj thinks Yahoo and Bing are working out how to merge these two algorithms and is probably working on it already causing some functions running erratically on Yahoo.</guessing>
Ok, after further testing, looks like any branded search will trigger the BusinessOL.com title. Everything else does not have it. Thanks also to Thomas Beatty who also pointed this out to me.
My theory is if the description is too long and/or duplicate content, it will not show up on the snippet.
So be relevant (possible call to action), short (150-165), descriptive (use page focused keywords for bold on listings), and be useful, regardless of search engine.
This is my opinion. I think yahoo and Dmoz directory change there styles and algorithm.
Maybe they not see the title tags or they consider your domain name due to its popularity.
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@Lloyd – Thanks for your input. Although here is what I can say about it:
DMOZ has no algorithm. It is not a search engine. It is a directory. MSN/Live/Bing and Google is already known to use the DMOZ title tag which is why the NOODP meta tag was invented. Yahoo was not know to do this, but does this with the Yahoo Directory and where you can use the NOYDIR meta tag.
Also I believe it is not part of the algorithm to just show the domain name. First of all, domains are case insensitive and would normally be all written in lowercase letters. You can clearly see in the search results that it is mixed case with capital B and capital OL which is exactly the same in DMOZ.
DMOZ has no algorithm, it is just a plain directory that is human edited and if that is how they accepted the listing and approved it, then that’s how it is. Since this is the only place having this type of casing, thus it really indicates that this is being pulled from DMOZ.
@Hans – I like your idea. The meta description does not seem to be a critical ranking factor, but more for increasing CTR. Thus optimizing the viewable meta description would be the ideal thing to do.
@Benj – I like your observation but it does seem that these results only appear for branded keywords which you did not mention in this blog post.
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