How to exclude or skip part of page content from SharePoint search crawler

To do this we have to use the "noindex" class, like this,

<div class="noindex"> footer </div>

This will be helpful if you want to avoid footer to get crawled in search. Because of the fact that the footer is part of the master page the crawler may index every single page that inherits from the master page. This will cause misleading and wrong search results for the visitors of the site.