Hiding or Promoting specific content within a page to search engines

Question

A bit of an SEO question here.

I've got a site with a ton of pages, of content. I know lots of the content is the same on each page.

I thought that Search Engines keyed off of the differences in page content so that they could promote the correct data, but when I look at the summary in google and bing, the summary shows my 'feedback' block (which is where I just ask for feedback).

Yahoo (and the summary in Facebook) shows my search options menu.

These aren't really things that are going to make a person want to click on the page.

So I'm wondering what the best way is to either hide this content from search engines, or improve the visibility of the other content that should get indexed.

The page structure is pretty consistent, so I thought it would have been easy for the search robots to pick this stuff out, but apparently not.

Answer 1

You may want to try using a meta tag like this.

< META NAME="description" CONTENT="Here is a short summary of the page" >

Search engines also prefer title and header tags over regular text.