In a move that should come as no surprise to SEOs, Google has officially stopped using DMOZ as a source for sites and pages in their search results.

DMOZ closed earlier this year, meaning Google no longer had an updated outside source – beyond the webpage itself – for pulling snippet information when the webpage was lacking in meta description or suitable high quality on-page text that could be used within Google’s search results.  So Google is asking site owners consider the meta description tags on their sites now that DMOZ is no longer being used.

This also means that the NOODP tag, the one that would prevent Google from using DMOZ as a source for the page, is essentially deprecated, at least for Google.  Other search engines or services may still pull DMOZ information, but it was primarily the Google use of it that most site owners were concerned about.  Bing still lists the NOODP tag in their page about what robots directives the Bing bot honors.

Google also reminds site owners about writing quality descriptions for their meta description tags so that the snippets Google shows are the most accurate and representative of the content on the page.