From previous answers here, and "general knowledge" (in other words, having seen every episode of all three Stargate shows, but not necessarily remembering all of them), a 7 symbol gate address is coordinates for a gate, and an 8 symbol gate address includes distance, then gate coordinates.
When they dial the stargate on the Destiny, they have no idea where the gate they're dialing is or what kind of place it is in. I don't remember a clear specification of what the 9th symbol was for. However, at the time, they had no way of knowing the gate was on the Destiny and the Destiny had been travelling for millennia. Even if gates were dialing each other every few thousand years, there would be no way of knowing Destiny's coordinates, since it was moving so rapidly.
The other issue is that Destiny didn't have the power to open a wormhole back to the Milky Way to update other gates with its coordinates.
In other words, there's no way the Milky Way gates could know, at that time, the coordinates of the Destiny.
How were they able to dial it without knowing the distance or coordinates or anything about where the gate was?
Answer
I found the answer in, of all places, the Stargate Wiki. The problem, as with most wikis, is that the articles are so unearthly long that you can get lost in one article or you can skim it and still miss details. On the entry for Stargate (D'oh! Forgot to look for the obvious article!), it states:
For a standard seven-chevron address, the first six glyphs represent points in space, forming three-dimensional coordinates. The seventh represents the point of origin, a glyph which is unique to each gate. For Stargates to access a destination outside of their galaxy, eight chevrons are used; the first six target a destination as normal, while a seventh glyph prior to the point of origin adds a distance calculation to the address, targeting a gate outside the galaxy as opposed to a local one. A nine-chevron address is more of a code than a location, and this allows connection to specific Stargates - regardless of their location. So far, the only two known nine-chevron address connect to the Ancient ship Destiny, and from Destiny to Earth, but it is possible that more of these addresses exist.
A 7 symbol dialout is normal, since that's 6 coordinates and the point of origin symbol. The 8 symbol dialout includes a space/distance calculation. The one that's really different is the nine symbol dialout, which is, as @HNL suggested here, like a MAC address. Each stargate has a unique one.
The 9 symbol dialout addressed the specific gate on the Destiny, no matter where it was. (And this also supports @PearsonArtPhoto's answer here that stargates do have to somehow communicate through subspace before the wormhole is formed -- otherwise, how would an originating gate know where the destination gate was if the address was given as the gate ID?)
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