Best way to stop a country dropdown from affecting google SEO

Question

We have a site that contains a "sign up" form in the sidebar in most pages. This signup contains a dropdown of countries, the contents of which are being indexed by google and affecting our sites SEO.

Is there any recommended way to resolve this. As far as I can tell the options are:

1) Make the dropdown load dynamically via javascript (not an option for us since we need to work for non-jsj clients)

2) Take the signup form, stick it in its own page, and include that page in an iframe instead. This way, google will index that seperate file once only and so the country dropdown options should not be ranked so highly.

Are there other options?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you go with option #2 you can then exclude the iframe page in your robots.txt and completely eliminate it from Google's index.

Answer 2

1 and 2 do sound like your options. 1 is ruled out because of the requirement to support non-JavaScript capable visitors, now, it's possible that JS in tandem with a <noscript> tag would be interpreted differently, but I would not count on that. 2, properly implemented (make sure the form targets _top and handles errors and validation properly) sounds like the thing.