Methods for preventing search engines from indexing irrelevant content on a page

Question

I\'m looking for ways to prevent indexing of parts of a page. Specifically, comments on a page, since they weigh up entries a lot based on what users have written. This make

Answer 1

This is the first I have heard that search engines provide a method for informing them that part of a page is irrelevant.

Google has a feature for web masters to declare parts of their site for a web search engine to use to find pages when crawling.

1. http://www.google.com/webmasters/
2. http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

You might be able to relatively de-emphasize some things on the page by specifying the most relevant keywords using META tag(s) in the HEAD section of your HTML pages. I think that is more in line with the engineering philosophy used to architect search engines in the first place.

Look at Google's Search Engine Optimization tips. They spell out clearly what they will and will not let you do to influence how they index your site.