What is the impact of a meta tag with content="noindex,nofollow"

Question

One of my clients is discussing a partnership. The potential partner is asking us to insert the following meta tag in the head-section of our site to "prevent their competitors from indexing the site":

<meta property="partnername:index" content="noindex,nofollow"/>

I really can't see what this tag does and if there is a risk that it prevents standard search engine crawlers (Google, Bing, ...) from indexing the pages.

To be clear: if there was a name attribute with value "robots", this would have been the usual way to tell search engines not to index and not to follow links on the page, but here it is different: no name attribute but a property attribute with the partner's name followed by ":index"

Answer 1

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

The robots meta tag in the above example instructs search engines not to show the page in search results. The value of the name attribute ( robots) specifies that the directive applies to all crawlers. To address a specific crawler, replace the robots value of the name attribute with the name of the crawler that you are addressing. Specific crawlers are also known as user agents (a crawler uses its user agent to request a page.) Google's standard web crawler has the user agent name Googlebot.

Whereas nofollow is defined like this:

Do not follow the links on this page. If you don't specify this directive, Google may use the links on the page to discover those linked pages.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_meta_tag

So for your example, the potential partner wants to blacklist the crawlers of its competitors. Whether that's worth it or not, is up to you.