MSN has graciously given us a new way to stop the ODP messing with out listings. They have supplied to two meta tags to instruct the engine not to use an ODP title for a result listing.
The ODP is an open source project to list websites by topic. As it is a volunteer project and very selective on who it allows to join, it is difficult to keep up to date, yet the search engines historically have judged the results as valuable. Unfortunately, its volunteer nature has meant that errors and out of date listings can be very difficult to correct.
The syntax MSN offers is:
<meta NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
or
<meta NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
I would suggest that the first will not validate - something like:
<meta NAME=”ODP” CONTENT=”NOTITLE”>
might have been more useful.
But the effort is much appreciated! Now if the other engines would follow, in the same fashion!