SEO related..the opposite of header tags

SEO related..the opposite of header tags

Hi everyone, I'm new to this phpcentral.com forum. I have a question about html as it relates to search engine optimization.

Is there a tag that de-emphasizes the importance of particular text to search engines, as in the reverse of the <h1> or <h2> header tags? The reason I'm asking this is because on my sites I have copyright and privacy policy stuff on the bottom and I hate to lose keyword density and PR to it. There's also other various forms of functionality text that is completely useless to a search engine.

As I see it, if we get tags to emphasize the importance of some text we should also have something for the opposite situation. I guess I'm nitpicking but I hope there's information or insight about this subject out there. I can hardly believe I'm the only one to have noticed this issue.

With links you can certainly make the big search engines ignore whatever you want by adding rel=nofollow in the <a ... > part of the link, or by blocking certain paths or files in your robots.txt. It's called PR sculpting.

As for text in general, I believe I've read somewhere that the search engines are good at detecting typical copyright/privacy policy lines and it's not something to get hung up about. Otherwise... <small> might do the trick?