How to make Google not index particular containers

[Luxus]

I want to optimize my SEO by focusing on content. I want to make it that Google only indexes relevant info, which does not include help pages or particular widgets (that's good for SEO, isn't it?).

Lets say I have this div container:

<div class="noIndex">This text should not be indexed by search engines</div>

Normally Google would crawl this container and index it. Is it possible to letting Goolge know that it is not allowed to index content inside this container?

 

[Jake Bunce]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex#Russian_.3Cnoindex.3E_tag

I don't know if Google supports it.

I wouldn't worry about optimizing SEO in this manner. It's overkill. XenForo is already SEO friendly.

 

[Mopquill]

Alternatively, you could exclude specific areas from being output based on the user-agent and/or IP, but, that might be a bit more involved, and might not be what you want.

 

[Luxus]

Hm...the <noindex> tag looks good. But since the wiki page has been edited last time in April 2012, I don't think Google supports the <noindex> tag yet.

I don't know how to do this user-agent/IP thing, but it sounds like more work than it's worth.

The background behind all this is that I was concerned about Google indexing to many irelevant content. I was a former Burning Board user and there you can soft-delete posts just like with XenForo except that the deletion notice was not only visible to moderators, but guests too. I copy&pasted the deletion note and searched for it via Google and then I got a lot of Burning Board sites with those notices. Since I want to make deletion notices visible for non-staff members, I got concerned about Google indexing those notices.

Hm..now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure anymore if this would hurt my SEO or not. I mean people would find my site faster if more keywords lead to my site, no?