Comment admin language interfering with SEO - Can I modify theme files to fix it?

Hi,

We've been using Atahualpa for quite some time and I just discovered using Google Webmaster Tools that when a post has a lot of comments, administrative words like the month the comments were posted and the word "reply" are being interpreted as keywords on the page by the Googlebot because they appear with every comment. Half of the keywords they relate to our site are irrelevant words like "Reply", "July", "August" and so on...

What would be the best way to try to change the page so that these things will not be indexed or, if necessary simply not be on the page at all?

I thought about possibly changing the "reply" text into an image and removing dates from the comments altogether in the comments.php

I really have no idea what would be the best way to handle this. Might this work or is there a better way to correct this?

Thanks in advance!

Michael