Is there a way to indicate boilerplate content on a page?

Matt's answer:

We have a question from MrTVTL, in Toronto, who asks “Have you implemented, or are you going to implement, ways that webmasters can clearly indicate boilerplate content to Google in order to avoid any duplicate content filters” So CSS IDs or using classes? “If so, how would navigation menus be handled?” So we don’t really provide a way to do that. And the reason is that we try to write algorithms to handle that sort of thing, rather than ask every webmaster on the web to annotate all that different stuff. In general, if it’s something that’s really hard or really tricky, where you are a person with domain specific knowledge, then it makes a lot of sense in order to have you doing the work to annotate a particular site or link. To say this is good or this is bad or this is boilerplate or whatever. But in general, I think our algorithms for spotting boilerplate actually work relatively well. So that’s one of the main reasons why we haven’t asked people to say, oh yes, here are some ways that you can designate the content that is boilerplate or navigational on your site.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: