Check out the description snippet in this query for Examiner.com, which is a fairly large news site that has been around for years:
Examiner DMOZ

Perhaps at some point, maybe a decade ago, Examiner.com was owned by The Journal Newspapers. It’s not now. Check out the citation for Examiner.com on this DMOZ page:

Examiner DMOZ Description

Look familiar?

Now check out this little grey Knowledge Graph whatever you call this thingy in this query for Goldbely:
Goldbely DMOZ

Now check out the citation for Golbely on this DMOZ URL from Feb 8, 2014:

Goldbely DMOZ Citation

A citation which was corrected over a year ago.

So again, I ask:

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10 Response Comments

  • Troy Philis  March 12, 2016 at 8:49 am

    There’s a dirty little secret in there somewhere.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 12, 2016 at 9:14 am

    BTW all you guys on Twitter and Facebook who are responding with “just use the NoODP tag”, you are missing the point.

  • Andy Kuiper  March 12, 2016 at 9:20 am

    I just had to adda no odp meta tags to a site the other day for a new client – it is interesting.

    • Andrew Shotland  March 12, 2016 at 9:25 am

      So perhaps there was some kind of Knowledge Graph update that broke the DMOZ filter. Would be interesting to see if any other KG elements got screwed up over the past week or so.

  • Justin Mosebach  March 14, 2016 at 9:57 am

    We’ve noticed that DMOZ thing appearing for at least several months.

    • Andrew Shotland  March 14, 2016 at 12:17 pm

      The Golbely thing has been around for at least a year. The Examiner one just popped up in the past few weeks.

  • Hans  March 21, 2016 at 1:33 am

    There was, and probably is, still a good reason why Google wants to show another title or description at the results page.

    The reason is that still a lot of people don’t have a proper title or description at their webpages. For example a lot of websites still have the title “home” and a lot of websites have the description “Just another wordpress site”. Not everyone is keen on technical on-page SEO.

    I have created a linkdirectory myself and have added thousends of websites. I can tell you that almost every website added needs a correction in at least the title. See this blog (http://blog.zomdir.com/2014/10/why-are-these-bots-visiting-zomdircom.html) for a screenshot before bad bots ruined the stats (http://www.zomdir.com/stats.htm).

    The volunteers of DMOZ correct titles when necessary. They even come with a short description about the website. That makes it a perfect alternative for better titles and descriptions.

    • Andrew Shotland  March 21, 2016 at 8:04 am

      Hans, I don’t disagree with your assessment about the general state of website descriptions. That said, the website mentioned has a description. That description is shorter than the DMOZ version. And that description is not incorrect. Just because DMOZ has a lot of data doesn’t mean it’s any good. And Google should be pretty good by now about not overwriting an authoritative website’s description with garbage.

  • Miguel  August 16, 2016 at 1:19 pm

    I started as a editor in DMOZ in 2010 and submited my own site. After beign inactive since 2011 and “rejoin” DMOZ it took me 5 years to get listed “lol” i approved my request from 2010… IN 2016.

    Funny isn’t it?

    • Andrew Shotland  August 16, 2016 at 2:05 pm

      Congratulationes Miguel. LMK when I can start submitting my links to you!