PlainDoctor

Data Changelog

This log lists material corrections and surface changes PlainDoctor applied after publication, including the 2026-08-09 removal of noindex /state, /hospital, /search, and DEAD research URLs from advertised sitemaps, the 2026-08-08 provider-page 503 fix, and the 2026-08-07 honest-org identity cleanup. Each entry is past-tense and tied to a repository commit; we do not invent rows to pad the list. How to report an issue is on the editorial & corrections policy and the typed corrections pathway. This public log starts on 2026-08-06. Data current as of 2026-05-20.

  1. · Index-surface

    Dropped hard-noindex /state and /hospital hubs from sitemap-static and sitemap-tier1 so crawlers stop being invited to empty URL_BLEED landing pages while disciplinary state pages stay advertised.

  2. · Index-surface

    Removed DEAD research hub and studies from sitemap-tier1 after they were already noindexed, so empty research URLs were no longer re-advertised through the tier-1 shard.

  3. · Index-surface

    Dropped the noindex /search route from sitemap-tier1 so the tools search surface stopped advertising a page Google was told not to index.

  4. · Data refresh

    Switched static and ranking sitemap lastmods to shard-aware page-vintage stamps so crawl dates reflect real page edits instead of a single portal-wide extract date.

  5. · Reliability

    Reworked provider-detail specialty cohort queries to a single cached fetch after live provider pages returned HTTP 503 under CPU saturation.

  6. · Editorial correction

    Removed fabricated “Editorial Team” identity copy and aligned publisher attribution to the honest solo-operated disclosure on accountability pages (AR-29).

  7. · Index-surface

    Replaced soft-404 redirects with real HTTP 404 responses so empty or retired URLs stop looking like valid indexable pages.

  8. · Index-surface

    Noindexed the DEAD_CLASS states hub and emptied its sitemap after admission evidence showed the class was not earning valid indexation.

  9. · Data integrity

    Hardened ETL so a full rebuild refuses to destroy unrepopulatable rows, protecting Open Payments, affiliations, and other stages that cannot be rebuilt from a single NPPES extract.