Is there a way to prevent Googlebot from indexing certain parts of a page?

Question

Is it possible to fine-tune directives to Google to such an extent that it will ignore part of a page, yet still index the rest?

There are a couple of different issues we've come across which would be helped by this, such as:

• RSS feed/news ticker-type text on a page displaying content from an external source
• users entering contact phone etc. details who want them visible on the site but would rather they not be google-able

I'm aware that both of the above can be addressed via other techniques (such as writing the content with JavaScript), but am wondering if anyone knows if there's a cleaner option already available from Google?

I've been doing some digging on this and came across mentions of googleon and googleoff tags, but these seem to be exclusive to Google Search Appliances.

Does anyone know if there's a similar set of tags to which Googlebot will adhere?

Edit: Just to clarify, I don't want to go down the dangerous route of cloaking/serving up different content to Google, which is why I'm looking to see if there's a "legit" way of achieving what I'd like to do here.

Answer 1

What you're asking for, can't really be done, Google either takes the entire page, or none of it.

You could do some sneaky tricks though like insert the part of the page you don't want indexed in an iFrame and use robots.txt to ask Google not to index that iFrame.

Answer 2

In short NO - unless you use cloaking with is discouraged by Google.