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Google and DMOZ

Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2015 3:18 pm
by Ben McNevis
Just checking up on the SEO front and I found that the snippet of text shown in a Google search result has changed from some bit of text that it found on my page to:

"Lochside holiday cottage which can sleep up to ten persons. Includes photographs, prices and local information."

Honestly, who says "persons" these days?

It's all true and correct, but it's not the way I write and I wondered where it came from. It turned out to be DMOZ. I submitted to DMOZ a month or two back as it's deemed a good thing to do. The snippet could be worse but it currently sounds less appealing than Google's previous attempt where the text was taken directly from my page.

Any ideas how to take control of the snippet text?

Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2016 5:34 am
by kevsboredagain
I'd not heard of DMOZ until I Googled it. Apparently you can simply become an editor. There is an edit link at the bottom of the page in font size 1.3 that invites you.

Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2016 7:55 am
by Joanna
I can't help with the editing question but I'm interested to read that DMOZ is still relevant. Many, many years ago I used to dabble in SEO and DMOZ was always one of the first places to register any new web site. Google would use DMOZ for the text that appears under the titles in its results. If it didn't find a DMOZ description then it grabbed snippets from the page itself, which often didn't (and still don't) make much sense. The advice was to craft a short description of your web site for DMOZ that contained your key words and phrases. Sounds like that Google DMOZ relationship is still working.

One of the reasons DMOZ is trusted by Google is because it's maintained by human editors who check every entry before it goes live. That means it should be possible to get someone to edit your entry if it's incorrect. However, they used to be inundated and it could take weeks just for a submission to go through. So changing the wording of an essentially correct listing wouldn't be high on their list.

Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2016 8:05 am
by Joanna
Just checked - find your entry on DMOZ and there's a small icon to the right of the listing. Click it and you can submit a suggestion for a change to the entry.

Our first cottage is on there but not the second so there's a little job for later.