NOODP and NOYDIR — legacy robots meta values
NOODP and NOYDIR were robots meta values that told search engines not to use the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) or the Yahoo Directory description and title for a page in results. Both directories are long gone and the directives are obsolete. This page explains what they did and why you can safely remove them from legacy templates.
What NOODP and NOYDIR did
For years, search engines could substitute a page's title and description in results with the entry from a web directory. NOODP (no Open Directory Project) asked engines not to use the DMOZ directory listing; NOYDIR (no Yahoo Directory) asked Yahoo not to use its own directory listing. Site owners added them to keep their own title tags and meta descriptions in results.
They were applied as robots meta values, for example a meta robots tag containing noodp, noydir, or both, sometimes targeted at specific crawlers.
Why they are obsolete
The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) shut down in 2017, and the Yahoo Directory closed years earlier. With no directories to pull from, NOODP and NOYDIR have nothing to suppress and are ignored by modern search engines.
There is no harm in leaving them, but they add noise. When auditing legacy templates, you can remove NOODP and NOYDIR from robots meta tags. To control how your snippet appears today, use current directives such as nosnippet, max-snippet, and data-nosnippet instead.
- DMOZ (Open Directory) closed in 2017; Yahoo Directory earlier
- Both meta values are ignored by modern engines
- Use nosnippet / max-snippet / data-nosnippet for snippet control now
How it appears in analytics and logs
Finding NOODP or NOYDIR in a page's robots meta tag means a legacy SEO convention is still embedded in your templates. It has no effect today because the directories these values referenced no longer exist.
Diagnostic use case
Recognise NOODP/NOYDIR in old templates or CMS settings, understand they no longer do anything, and remove them as harmless legacy clutter.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID focuses on live crawl and bot signals rather than obsolete meta values, so cleaning out NOODP/NOYDIR is purely template hygiene with no impact on the bot data it records.
Common mistakes
- Adding NOODP/NOYDIR today expecting them to influence snippets — they do nothing.
- Confusing these legacy values with current snippet directives like nosnippet.
- Leaving large blocks of obsolete directives that obscure the meta tags that do matter.
Privacy and accuracy notes
These directives concern result snippets and titles only, never visitor identity. WebmasterID does not rely on them and treats crawler fetches of the pages as bot events.
Related pages
- Meta robots directives reference
The robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag header share a vocabulary of indexing directives. This page is a reference for the common ones — noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, and the max-snippet family — explaining what each does and how to combine them.
- The nosnippet robots directive explained
nosnippet is a Google robots directive that tells Google not to show any text snippet or video preview for a page in search results. This page explains where to set it, what it affects, and how it relates to the finer-grained max-snippet and data-nosnippet controls.
- The data-nosnippet attribute explained
data-nosnippet is a Google-supported HTML attribute that marks portions of a page so they are not used in search snippets. This page explains how to apply it, which elements support it, and how it differs from the page-level nosnippet directive.
- WebmasterID docs
Reference guides for crawl control and meta directives.
Sources and verification notes
- Google — meta tags Google supports (legacy directives)Modern supported meta values; NOODP/NOYDIR are not among them.
- DMOZ / Open Directory Project — closureThe Open Directory Project closed in March 2017.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.