Google using DMOZ descriptions

[Ian J]

A couple of months ago Google started using DMOZ descriptions in their listings instead of the site's own meta description. This was a bit of a pain as the meta description is the start of the sales pitch and mine was written specially to get people to click on the link and read my site. I think that this gave a distinct advantage to sites that weren't listed in Google as they could keep their flowery descriptions.

I'm ranked in second place in Google for my single word search term but my competitor in first place had their equally catchy meta description changed to the more prosaic and boring DMOZ description so I suppose that neither one of us had any advantage.

Yesterday I noticed that whilst my Google description was still plain and boring my main competitor had managed to get theirs switched back to sales mode as did one other on the first page of Google results. I don't know whether or not it is co-incidence but both companies use the same company for SEO and I am wondering if they have found a workaround for this problem.

I have looked around myself but cannot find any trace of anyone admitting to knowing a workaround and wondered if anyone here had come across this recently.

I know that one workaround would be to be removed from DMOZ but I think that may be a bit drastic and I don't know what other aspects of my high search engine ranking that may affect.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[buying_it]

It only displays if the DMOZ description if it contains one or more of the keywords that have been searched for.

I don't think there is any real workaround for it other than to harrang DMOZ into changing your description (very little hope for success)

It all seems a little bleak at the moment - but hopefully google will sort itself out and change back to meta descritions soon.