Is there a way to make robots ignore certain text?

There is a simple way to tell google to not index parts of your documents, that is using googleon and googleoff:

<p>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google.</p>

<!--googleoff: index-->

<p>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</p>

<!--googleon: index-->

In this example, the second paragraph will not be indexed by Google. Notice the “index” parameter, which may be set to any of the following:

• index — content surrounded by “googleoff: index” will not be indexed by Google

  anchor — anchor text for any links within a “googleoff: anchor” area will not be associated with the target page

  snippet — content surrounded by “googleoff: snippet” will not be used to create snippets for search results

  all — content surrounded by “googleoff: all” are treated with all

source

I work on a site with top-3 google ranking for thousands of school names in the US, and we do a lot of work to protect our SEO. There are 3 main things you could do (which are all probably a waste of time, keep reading):

• Move the stuff you want to downplay to the bottom of your HTML and use CSS and/or to place it where you want readers to see it. This won't hide it from crawlers, but they'll value it lower.
• Replace those links with images (you say you don't want to do that, but don't explain why not)
• Serve a different page to crawlers, with those links stripped. There's nothing black hat about this, as long as the content is fundamentally the same as a browser sees. Search engines will ding you if you serve up a page that's significantly different from what users see, but if you stripped RSS links from the version of the page crawlers index, you would not have a problem.

That said, crawlers are smart, and you're not the only site filled with permalink and rss links. They care about context, and look for terms and phrases in your headings and body text. They know how to determine that your blog is about technology and not RSS. I highly doubt those links have any negative effect on your SEO. What problem are you actually trying to solve?

If you want to build SEO, figure out what value you provide to readers and write about that. Say interesting things that will lead others to link to your blog, and crawlers will understand that you're an information source that people value. Think more about what your readers see and understand, and less about what you think a crawler sees.

Firstly think about the issue. If Google think "RSS" is the main keyword that may suggest the rest of your content is a bit shallow and needs expanding. Perhaps this should be the focus of your attention.If the rest of your content is rich I wouldn't worry about the issue as a search engine should know what the page is about from title and headings. Just make sure RSS etc is not in a heading or bold or strong tag.

Secondly as you rightly mention, you probably don't want use images as they are not assessable to screen readers without alt text and if they have alt text or supporting text then you add the keyword back in. However aria live may help you get around this issue, but I'm not an expert on accessibility.

Options:

• Use JavaScript to write that bit of content (maybe ajax it in after load). Search engines like Google can execute JavaScript but I would guess it wont value any JS written content very highly.
• Re-word the content or remove duplicates of it, one prominent RSS feed link may be better than several smaller ones dotted around the page.

• Use the css content attribute with pseudo :before or :after to add your content. I'm not sure if bots will index words in content attributes in CSS and know that contents value in relation to each page but it seems unlikely. Putting words like RSS in the CSS basically says it's a style thing not an HTML thing, therefore even if engines to index it they wont add much/any value to it. For example, the HTML and CSS could be:

  <a href="/my-feed.rss" class="add-text"></a>
  
  .add-text:after { content:'View my RSS feed'; }
  

Note the above will not work in older versions of IE, so you may need some IE version comments if you care about that.