[PaulHoule]

Personally I don't think "nofollow" and "noindex" are effective the way many webmasters think. I think they're a scam that Matt Butts came up to gaslight webmasters, right up there with all the other Matt Butts schemes to gaslight webmasters.

You're right though that you have to moderate the stuff. It's typical backwards Google Economy thinking that have to block spam to please Google (that's how an SEO spammer thinks, it's the only thing they think) as opposed to block spam so that your users will keep coming back. Letting your web site get spammed is like fertilizing your flowers with herbicide.

[solardev]

I don't know who Matt Butts is, but what do you mean? Those are just standard tools, along with robots.txt and a siremap, for telling well-behaved crawlers what to index and not. I've used them effectively across many sites. They won't help with rude crawlers (LLM training etc.) that ignore those signals, but should work with all major search engines. What am I missing?

But yeah, I think spam should be deleted altogether, not merely hidden from search engines.