Called a “weather update” by the Yahoo search team, a round of search engine ranking tweaks have been added today according to this blog post. I am looking forward to seeing how this new set of updates pans out. There does not appear to be a concensus at WebmasterWorld regarding this update; some have noticed changes and some have not. As a result, keeping in line with Yahoo!’s lingo; StepForth’s doppler radar does not forecast a huge storm (aka, it doesn’t appear to be a huge shakeup 😉
In addition to this update Yahoo! announced that it is now formally supporting the NOODP tag:
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”> or
<meta name=”Slurp” content=”NOODP”>
Google implemented the NOODP tag around July 14th of this year. For those of you unfamiliar with this tag it is designed to tell the search engines NOT to use the description that you have in your Open Directory Project (ODP) listing. This tag was an extremely welcome addition for webmasters because search engines were using the often out of date and poorly written descriptions from the ODP as the default for associated organic results. Finally, with the implementation of this weather update Yahoo has enabled site owners to prevent the use of their ODP description.