Fred Thompson’s Webmaster Doesn’t Know Dmoz

A Knoxville TV station reported the confusion at the Thompson camp over what Google has to say about the candidate’s I’m With Fred site:

Type the phrase “Friends of Fred Thompson” into Google, and the first link returned by the search engine describes the Web page as the “Official site of Fred Thompson for President Exploratory Committee.”

An exploratory committee would be a major step between Thompson’s less formal “testing the waters” committee and an official bid for the Republican nomination for president.

But spokeswoman Linda Rozett called the description inaccurate. Rozett said she doesn’t know how the description got on Google.

We’re pretty sure we found the reason why, and our readers probably figured it out too. On the Dmoz Open Directory site, take a look at this page about Thompson, particularly the starred entry near the top:

I’m With Fred – Official site of Fred Thompson for President Exploratory Committee.

Google has pulled the description seen in its search results from Dmoz. The ‘I’m With Fred’ webmaster doesn’t seem to know this little bit of HTML-fu, which will help the campaign stop this from happening:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

That tag will keep search engine crawlers from using the description on the Dmoz Open Directory. If the candidate is feeling grateful for this help, he can offer me the position of Ambassador to Tropical Places if he is elected.

This is great for anyone that has an outdated ODP listing – who doesn’t these days – or simply prefers not to have it displayed for their site.

As MSN points out, just don’t expect an immediate fix:

A word of caution: Putting either tag in your pages will not make your search results descriptions change immediately – they will change once our crawler has re-crawled the page. Usually that takes about 1 day -4 weeks for us to re-crawl you (ok, that sounds odd, but we hope you know what we mean).

Nice work guys. Let’s hope Google goes along with the new tag.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.