How can I tell Google not to index a portion of a webpage?

[bradwayland]

I'm working with an ecommerce site that has many product descriptions for various brands that are important to have but are all straight duplicates.  I'm looking for some type of tag tht can be implemented to prevent Google from seeing these as duplicates while still allowing the page to rank in the index.  I thought I had found it with Googleoff, googleon tag but it appears that this is only used with the google appliance hardware.

[max.favilli]

Correct you should make sure is not used elsewhere.

But I can't refrain from stressing again to hide the content is unlikely the best strategy.

[bradwayland]

So what should it look like in the code?

If my area to block was a product description it might say

"Product Description

bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla"

Secondly, in the robots.txt if I disallow /iframes/ then I would need to make sure we are not using iframes anywhere else?

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

Just as Chris Painter pointed out, you shouldn't worry too much about duplicate content if your site is legit (not an autoblog for example) and if you really want hide it from google, iframes are the way to go.

[GPainter]

Matt Cutts has said (source:http://youtu.be/Vi-wkEeOKxM )  not to worry too much about duplicate content especially with the sheer volume of it there is on the internet. You may find you're looking more like you are trying to cheat Google or similar which could cause you a bigger head ache not to mention you may slow your webapge down, duplicate content isn't the worse enemy for seo.  If you are worried put all the effort of trying to hide stuff from Google into making the product description unique.

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hello Brad,

Just to get your question clear.

I'm I correct that you want a method that does let Google (and other search engines) know a portion of your pages are duplicates while you want both duplicated pages and original pages to rank in the SERP's?

If you could provide us with an example (link) that would help a great deal as well.

[Alick300]

Hi Brad,

You can prevent Google from seeing portions of the page by putting those portions in iframes that are blocked by

robots.txt.

Disallow: /iframes/

Thanks

[max.favilli]

You can iframe those chunks of content and block with robots.txt or just meta tagging noindex in the iframe source.

But I would not, if you can't build a plan to make the content unique just canonicalize, or let google choose which page to pick among the duplicate bunch.