a good read. however, some input. MSN relies heavily on dmoz. unfortunately, after years being listed on dmoz, my site (and others) were edited out by the current Editor for the subcategory where i was listed. so, bye bye to my MSN listing for my main keyword.

i have sent a note to dmoz abuse to report this guy, and have resubmitted my site. no progress yet after 3 weeks. dammit. tim

I would imagine MSN has moved on from relying on the now defunct dmoz.

dmoz  defunct?? when did that happen? and if so, where did my site go on MSN??!!

actually, i got this from MSN Oct. 5:

MSN draws descriptions from the Meta Tags, from the site text, and even from www.dmoz.com. The context in which each of these methods is used depends on factors that include but are not limited to the keyword relevance, the relationship of the keywords to actual text on the site, the Meta Tag information on the page, and the DMOZ description. You and I cannot adjust this information.

Although policies and practices are always under review, currently all Windows Live Search search descriptions for your website cannot be made to use your Meta Tag. If you find the DMOZ descriptions to be unsatisfactory or out of date, or if are dissatisfied with these descriptions for any reason, please visit the following DMOZ Web site for information about how to change or update the descriptions:  http://www.dmoz.org/help/update.html

In addition, Windows Live Search also introduce a new option at the page level, a robots meta tag that tells the MSNBot not to use the DMOZ site snippet.  This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file.

In your Web page you would put:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

or

<META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">

In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to us. As far as we know right now, we are the only search engine  to support this  tag, so the two are the same for the moment. But when others follow suit, you could use the second tag to get only MSN to ignore ODP content for your page.

Note: 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 to 4 weeks for us to re-crawl you.

You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service. 

Thank you for using Windows Live Search.

i guess i should no longer be concerned about dmoz?? thanks Matt. tim