WooCommerce and pharmacy
Excluding a regulated range on a store whose addresses do not distinguish it
The rule in this trade is that a whole category has to be unanswerable rather than carefully answered, and the only reliable way to make a category unanswerable is to keep it out of the material entirely. That requires the material to be divisible along the same line as the category, and on this platform it usually is not, because a product lives at an address that says nothing about what kind of product it is.
Why this pairing is its own job
The WooCommerce install guide covers the tag, and the pharmacy guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- A product sits under one shared base in the address, and the category it belongs to is a taxonomy rather than a segment of the path. So the split a pharmacy has to make cannot be written as a path rule at all, unless somebody changes the permalink structure for every product on the store.
- The safe material and the forbidden material are on the same install. Hours, services, delivery and the prescription process are pages, the medicines are products, and one snippet prints across all of it while one crawl reaches all of it.
- The checkout is yours here rather than the store platform's, which removes a protection a hosted shop gets for free. A basket with a medicine in it and a launcher in the corner invites the question about taking two things together at the moment somebody has already decided to buy both.
- Themes print related, upsell and recently viewed blocks inside other product pages and in the basket, so the names and descriptions of an excluded range turn up inside the pages you deliberately kept.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the WooCommerce guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a pharmacy site specifically.
Find out what you can actually exclude before you promise an exclusion
Open a product on your own store and read the address. If the category is not in it, there is nothing in the path for a crawl rule to act on, and the honest options are three: change the permalink base for every product, block the range in the file the crawl obeys, or stop selling that range through the public store.
None of those is a settings change and all three have consequences outside this project, which is exactly why the decision belongs before the first crawl rather than after it. Removing material from a corpus that has already answered is slower and less certain than never putting it in.
Tags and attributes look as though they should help and do not. They organise products for shoppers and for your own reporting, and neither of those is something a crawl can be scoped by.
The basket and the checkout are a decision here
Wrap the echo in a check for the basket and the checkout and return early. On most stores that is a preference about distraction. On a pharmacy it is the point, because every question typed over a basket of medicines is in the category that must never produce an answer.
If you run a consultation questionnaire on the same install, that is a page of your own site rather than a supplier's frame, so the tag prints on it unless you name it too. Put it in the same condition and keep the whole rule in one place where the next person can see it.
The volume is on pages, and on this platform the pages are already here
A hosted store has nowhere to put hours, a bank holiday rota, the consultation room or the delivery area, so they end up on a second site or nowhere. Here they are ordinary pages under the same hook and inside the same crawl, which is the genuine advantage this platform has for this trade.
Keep the hours on a page somebody maintains and treat them as safety information rather than as an about detail. Somebody may be travelling to collect something they need that night, and a closing time wrong by an hour is the failure with an evening attached to it.
Where the answerable material lives
| Health advice posts, which are not products and survive a product exclusion | A pharmacy that has been on WordPress for a while has written about hay fever, about winter illness, about travel. Those posts are the best writing on the site and the most dangerous thing in the corpus, and a rule aimed at the shop does not touch a single one of them. |
|---|---|
| Category and tag archives, which reproduce the range as text | An archive prints titles and short descriptions for an entire category at one address. Exclude the product pages and leave the archive in, and the range is still in the material, in a more quotable form than the individual pages were. |
| Hours, the rota and the lunchtime closure, on a page you maintain | Not only in a theme widget that prints into every page and gets edited by nobody. This is the most asked question at any pharmacy and the one most often wrong online, and here it is also the easiest of all of them to keep right. |
| Access, the consultation room and the languages the team speaks | Step free entry, whether there is a private room and what it is used for, and which languages somebody can be served in. It decides whether a person uses you at all, it never varies case by case, and none of it exists anywhere in a store's own data. |
The first thing to get right
Open a product page on your own store, read the address, and settle how the range exclusion will be enforced before you crawl anything.
The rule this trade works to excludes a category rather than a list of phrasings, and on this platform the address will not enforce it for you. Everything else, the threshold, the refusal wording, the pages worth writing, is downstream of knowing whether the exclusion is a crawl rule, a permalink change or a decision to sell that range somewhere else.
The failure that belongs to this combination
The excluded range, reappearing inside the pages you kept
The medicines are out of the crawl and the toiletries are in, and a toiletry product page carries a block of related items underneath it, printed by the theme from whatever the store considers relevant. Some of those items come from the range you excluded, with their names and their short descriptions attached.
So the excluded products are in the corpus after all, in fragments, inside pages that were deliberately included. A question about one of them finds a match, and the match is a page you approved. Nothing about the crawl scope was wrong and nothing about the exclusion was ignored.
Check it directly: after the first crawl, ask the assistant about a product from the excluded range and read what it cites. If it cites a page you kept, the theme is the route in, and the fix belongs in the settings for those blocks rather than in the crawl.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a pharmacy visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can we just block the range in the file the crawl obeys?
- You can, and it is the cheapest of the routes. Check that it covers the category and tag archives as well as the product pages, and check what your theme prints inside the pages you left in, because a rule written against product addresses does not reach a block rendered on a different page.
- Should the launcher be on the basket?
- No, and unlike a hosted store you have to decide it rather than having it decided for you. One condition in the snippet keeps it off the basket and the checkout, and it is worth writing at install time, because the questions asked there are the ones a pharmacy cannot answer at all.
- Our health advice posts are the best writing on the site. Can they stay in?
- Not in the material. They read as usage information, which is exactly the shape of text that answers a medicine question well, and an answer built from one is the pharmacy advising in its own name with a citation to prove it. Leave them published for readers and out of the corpus.
Keep reading
- Installing on WooCommerceHook the script into wp_footer so it survives theme updates, keep it out of the parent theme, and stop a caching plugin from mangling it.
- Everything for a pharmacyOpening hours, services and prescription collection are safe ground. Anything about a medicine belongs with the pharmacist.
- Ten years of seasonal advice, all of it still liveTen years of dated advice posts are still live, the consent banner holds the script back, and April ends up answering a November question.
- Lead times, spec sheets and the form that replaced the checkoutLead times hide in a custom field, spec sheets are PDFs in your uploads folder, and the checkout is often an enquiry form instead.
- A pharmacy on Shopify, and the range the assistant must never readEvery product is a public page a crawl can reach, so a pharmacy store puts its whole medicines range into the corpus by default. Undo that before you index.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.