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A practical look at robots.txt for a dental office
20 Jul 2025
How a dental office deals with robots.txt — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: three unused font weights. This breaks robots.txt for a dental office.
If the hours on Google disagree with the site, people trust Google and then arrive angry. robots.txt will not fix that. The hours page will.
Managed hosting handles robots.txt automatically — until it does not. a dental office learned this when their provider migrated servers and three unused font weights disappeared silently.
We do not start with a platform when handling robots.txt. We write down who types what, who gets the mail, and what must not get lost. That list is always shorter than a vendor pitch deck.
We deployed a fix for robots.txt at 5 PM on a Friday. It worked, but if it had not, we would have had no one available. We no longer push to production after Thursday noon.
The worst robots.txt failure we have seen at a dental office was invisible for eight months. The backup existed but had never been tested, and the data inside was three migrations old.
a dental office did not need a portal. They needed a page that said who they are, what they do, and a phone number that somebody picks up before the fifth ring.
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