Feeding Google the relevant parts of a site

Any advice?

[yosmc]

I have >5,000 pages of my site indexed by Google. A lot of them are forum pages, and although they seem different and meaningful to the human eye, I am getting the feeling that Google is not so delighted about them because >90% of these pages (menus, borders, images etc. etc.) is always the same.

Not sure, but I am having the impression that Google is becoming increasingly picky about duplicate content, and that having that many pages in the index that are - from Google's point of view - similar might harm my site instead of doing it any good.

Yet I feel that it is legitimate to have those pages spidered, because they do represent unique content. So I am wondering if there is a good method to feed Google just the "unique" parts of a site without boring it with the rest?

[Dolemite]

> So I am wondering if there is a good method to feed Google just the "unique" parts of a site without boring it with the rest?

External CSS is good way to reduce on-page code bloat. Beyond doing that, I wouldn't worry too much. As I understand it, google actually stores content in the index it retrieves search from as plain text (no code/tags), so assuming the actual forum posts are at all unique, they'd look very different from each other in this index.

I'm not even as sold on CSS anymore, after seeing lots of nested table FrontPage-style code bloat rank well.