How do search engines ignore repititious page elements?

excluding HTML page elements from spider

[pavlovapete]

Hi,

Can someone please help me find the right words to describe what I mean?

I'm playing around with spider/search engine scripts hoping to build a small vertical.

I'm assuming that search engine algorithms are able to "ignore" certain page elements for example my navigation and footer and not include these elements in SERPs.

I am looking for some words/search terms to describe this process.

I imagine that this process has psuedo-code like:
- crawl all pages
- identify repititous blocks/elements common to most/all pages
- exclude repititous blocks/elements from index

Is there a "scientific" term that describes this process that I can use to find out more?

Thanks

I hope I have posted in the right forum.

[coopster]

A belated welcome to WebmasterWorld, pavlovapete.

Is it that you are concerned about your navigation menu?