Read, dated and signed: a pharmacy's review routine for pages and posts

What goes through the routine, and who reads each item

Everything the pharmacy publishes under its own name goes through it, wherever it appears: the site, the posts, the newsletter, and words other people write for the pharmacy to send. The reader is the pharmacist in charge, because the sentences at risk are about medicines and services, and that is the person who can say whether each one is true of this pharmacy. Counsel reads too where an item names a medicine or carries an offer. None of what follows sets out a rule; it is a way of working, and none of it is legal advice.

The review reply has a check of its own, because its risk is a person rather than a medicine: privacy on the public pages covers it. And where one person drafts and signs, as in a pharmacy with one pharmacist, the reading happens on a different day from the writing. A sentence read cold is read the way a customer will read it. What the items should state in the first place is set out in the overview for pharmacies.

Reading a draft one sentence at a time

Each sentence gets one of three labels, and a sentence without a label does not go out. A fact about the pharmacy is checked against the pharmacy's own records: the hours table, the service schedule, the license, the delivery terms. Words from a product's approved information are checked against the maker's current document, word for word, with the source and date beside them. Anything else, a recommendation, a comparison, a promise, a word on the pharmacy's list, comes out, or goes to counsel with the question written down.

Write the label on the draft, beside the sentence, so the next person to open it can see why each line survived. A sentence that needs a long argument before it can be labeled is a candidate to take out. The labels are a form of fact-checking done before publication instead of after, by the one person at the pharmacy who can say whether a sentence is true of it.

The pharmacy's own list of words it does not use

The list belongs to the pharmacy; it is not a rule book. It grows from three places: what the pharmacist in charge reads in the rules where the pharmacy operates, the answers counsel gives to questions the pharmacy puts to them, and the pharmacy's own decisions about sentences that came out. Each entry holds the word or phrase, the decision, who made it and on what date, and the wording to use instead where there is one.

Four kinds of words are worth putting to the pharmacist in charge first, because each says something about a medicine that no pharmacy page can show: words that promise an outcome, such as "cures" or "guaranteed"; words that rank, such as "best" or "strongest"; words that take away risk, such as "harmless"; and words that hurry, such as "today only" beside a medicine. Whether any of them is restricted where you operate is for the rules and counsel to say. The list records the answer once it comes.

Keep the list in one document with a version number, and write the version into each sign-off. When an entry is added, every live page, post and archived newsletter that uses the word is read again, which is one of the triggers below.

The sign-off, and what it records

Each reading ends in a sign-off, one per version of an item. It is short, and it is the part that lets anyone later see what the pharmacy published, when, and on whose reading.

The markup, the page's structured data, is part of the page for this purpose. A description in the JSON-LD is published under the pharmacy's name like any sentence a visitor reads, and Google's introduction to structured data asks for markup that describes what the visitor can see. So the reader labels it too, and a reader who does not read code asks for its statements as a plain list. Keep the sign-offs together, in date order, for as long as counsel advises.

What sends an item back to the pharmacist

An item that was right when it was signed can go wrong without anyone touching it, because something it describes changed. So the routine reopens on events at the pharmacy and at the maker, not only on edits.

Start from the fact that changed and find every place it is written. A new delivery day changes the delivery page, the post that announced last year's day, the newsletter archive and the profile, and each of those is a new version with its own sign-off. The steps for a claim you never made, from keeping the answer to telling the pharmacist in charge, are in stating what you offer without health claims.

Archives, flyers and old posts: the words that stay public

Some items slip past a routine because nobody thinks of them as published any more: last winter's flyer still linked as a PDF, the newsletter archive, a post about a service that ended. They are public text under the pharmacy's name for as long as they stay up, and an AI assistant with web search on can fetch an archive page as readily as the homepage. Each one is also a brand mention of the pharmacy, written by the pharmacy.

Files are the ones people forget. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites, 2.1% kept real content, such as a price list or a service menu, in a PDF, across all 40 trades; we publish no pharmacy-only cut. A flyer in a file is read by whoever opens it, and it is read in the words it had on the day it was printed.

1. List every archive the pharmacy has: the newsletter archive, old posts, files linked from the site, pages from a previous version of the site.
2. Read each against the word list and the current facts, the same way as a new draft.
3. Correct what can be corrected, and date the correction on the item itself.
4. Take down what cannot, with a permanent redirect to the current page where an old address still has links pointing at it.
5. Record each decision as a sign-off, so the archive has a history like everything else.