Is there a way to mark a section of a page as being less important for snippets?

Matt's answer:

Here’s a question from Dan W. in San Franscisco. Dan says, “Can Google provide a way to mark a section of our pages as being less important for being indexed or snippeted by Google? Sort of like the AdSense section targeting comments. The snippet that Google SERPs is one’s site menu or similar.” So we tried to do a good job of detecting boilerplate and things that are duplicate or redundant and not showing that in the snippet so maybe you want to highlight that for us, because it sounds like our Snippets Team could use that as an example to improve. We don’t have any special syntax to say, “Don’t index this part of a page” or “Don’t really use this part of a page in the meta description,” because at different times, different parts of the page can be very helpful. Yahoo does have some syntax for that, whenever we looked at it across the web, not very many people were using it. So it’s unclear exactly how much demand there is for that. Historically, our philosophy has been that we tried to detect automatically which parts of a page are sort of not as helpful or a little bit redundant or boilerplate or navigational and if those are not as useful, then we try not to use that in the snippet. So if you see examples where we’re doing that really badly, you know, send me a tweet or blog about it and maybe I can pass that on to the Snippets Team.

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

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