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A practical look at robots.txt for a walk-in clinic
30 Jan 2024
How a walk-in clinic deals with robots.txt — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: an inbox shared between the office and the webmaster. This breaks robots.txt for a walk-in clinic.
The best robots.txt setup is the one nobody has to think about. For a walk-in clinic, that means auto-renew, auto-redirect, and a monitoring ping every four hours.
Managed hosting handles robots.txt automatically — until it does not. a walk-in clinic learned this when their provider migrated servers and an inbox shared between the office and the webmaster disappeared silently.
Nobody at a walk-in clinic could remember who had configured robots.txt. The credentials were in a text file inside a folder called OLD STUFF on a shared drive.
Two-factor on the registrar account is the single highest-value thing we do for a walk-in clinic when managing robots.txt. Everything else can be rebuilt; a stolen domain cannot.
a walk-in clinic asked us to look at robots.txt after a customer screenshot showed a browser warning. The fix took eleven minutes; finding the cause took two hours.
Search consoles like honest sitemaps. Every loc should be a document. Reserving ten thousand empty shells and hoping Google does not notice is not a strategy for robots.txt.
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