I have a requirement to challenge a visitor to accept the terms and conditions of the page they are viewing. If a user has not accepted the terms, it will be displayed on every page they visit, it will take the form of a JavaScript modal dialog but when js is not available it needs to be at the top of the page. When they accept, they will be cookied and the HTML for the challenge will not be output to the page.
Search engine spiders will never accept the terms and conditions and will therefore see the T&C copy on every page, vary near the top of the HTML source, and presumably index that for every page.
Is there a way to mark up an element to tell the spiders there is no useful information contained in this element, or "Please don't index this element"?
I guess this is kind of like reverse-cloaking. I want the SEs to ignore this legal jargon so that they can actually index the interesting content of the pages.
Alternatively, would it be considered cloaking, and as such incur a penalty if I hid this from the SEs based on user-agent?