How do you block google bots from crawling parts of a page?

trying to avoid the -950 and -30 penalty if applicable

[dailypress]

I have a column full of random links on several pages (i.e. text links to random videos) and therefore Google Ads shows completely irrelevant ads worth a few cents per click.
Most importantly my pages do not show up on Google SERP because Google cant figure out what the pages are about.
I used Titles/Unique Meta Tags and Headers/URLs including keywords, however because of the Menu bar with many different keywords I am worried Google cant figure out the main topic.
Is there any code I could add or anyway I could block the series of words from being indexed? (This Menu Column with Random Text exists on all pages but is only a portion of the page)

[LifeinAsia]

Is there anything else on the page besides random links? If so, then there really isn't any content on the page, so it's doubtful you'll ever get relevant ads.

My suggestion is to at least organize the links topically and add a description describing the topic of the links on that specific page.

[Gede]

Maybe you can code the links in javascript?

[rainborick]

One method is to use an <iframe> to embed the extraneous content into your page. This way the irrelevant material is contained in a separate document. Just remember to set the links to target="_top" in the external document.

[frakilk]

I have a column full of random links on several pages (i.e. text links to random videos) and therefore Google Ads shows completely irrelevant ads worth a few cents per click

You may want to look into section targeting
[google.com...]
Use it around h1 tags, descriptive info for the page and other texts that you want the AdSense ads to reflect.

[tedster]

frakilk, you are correct, but that kind of tagging (section targeting) only affects ad targetting in Adsense. The organic search algo still takes in the whole page.

[dailypress]

interesting stuff frakilk,I will take a note of that. But I am more concerned on Google SERP. I have a bar of links to videos on one side and videos with a brief text description playing on the other.

[dailypress]

I think I will use the

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> code from

[google.com...] AND ALSO convert the menu to JavaScript and see what happens. Hopefully using both strategies won’t hurt.