Why you should quit using <meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir"> in your metatags

Some basics for starters

NOODP means "No ODP" but why would I use this? And whatever it is, do I still need it?

NOYDIR stands for "No Yahoo Directory" but what is it for? Any threat?

What about meta robots noodp noydir? Here we present you one of those SEO things that can not be understood. It's like seeing a walking dinosaur in a zoo and nobody is surprised except you...

Precedents

In the mid-1990s there were 2 types of search engines; The ones that were organized as a directory (all but Altavista) and Altavista, the only one of certain reputation in applying the Boolean search (Google's Omnibox, the tiny search box everywhere, does Boolean search on steroids). For the top of the directory-style, the top 2 were undoubtedly Yahoo and ODP.

Yahoo was in fact the great antagonist of Altavista, a company that eventually acquired Overture (owners of Yahoo) in 2003. Let's talk about the other great directory...

ODP/DMOZ was a NPO, multi-lingual collaborative project powered by volunteer editors, the Open Directory Project was also known as DMOZ for its original domain being Netscape its developer, the same people competing in the browser market and resulted overtaken by Microsoft and its Internet Explorer.

Because of this universal and disinterested character, coupled with the great zeal of the editors (scratching the paranoid in some cases), the ODP was perceived as a truthful and authoritative source for company listings and online resources.

ODP dumped its database for open use on a monthly basis and the list of more than 3,000 search engines incorporating this dump on a regular basis was actually known, in fact it was official ODP literature.

You may still remember some agencies or individuals claiming they'd "submit your site to search engines" for a small fee listing your web site in more than 3000 search engines (read directories)... It sounds well, right? That was the first big fraud in the SEO world. They put an entry in the corresponding category and they waited a month, unless they didn't directly have a mercenary editor who managed the work.

Facts. Ghosts of the Past

• ODP/DMOZ closed the project definitively on March 17^th, 2017
• Yahoo Directory closed its local directories around 2015

With so many developers and the community around SEO in general, it seems strange that there are still so many websites with clear visible signs of "SEO attention" that continue to waste bytes with these obsolete parameters.

Conclusion: it is useless and poses no threat

is obsolete.

It's time to clean up your code, you'll see what happens with the supposed re-launch of ODP...