The short version
I am Bill Hartzer. I am an SEO consultant, a domain name expert, and an expert witness, and I have practiced search engine optimization since 1996. I run Hartzer Consulting, which I founded in 2016, and DNAccess, which I founded in March 2023. I live and work in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas.
This site is my professional record. It exists because a search for my name should return something accurate and complete, written by me, rather than a scrape of a stale directory listing or an aggregator page repeating a number nobody checked. It does not sell anything, quote anything, or take an engagement. Where the work is commercial, this site points at the business that does it.
I have held this record to the standard I would apply to a client site during an audit. Every claim traces to a source. Dates are published where they are documented and left out where they are not. Anything I can only assert on my own authority is labeled as mine. That means a few things a marketing biography would include are missing here, and that is deliberate: a record you cannot check is not a record, it is copy.
Software manuals, then HTML by hand
I started out as a technical writer. In the early 1990s I wrote software manuals for IBM mainframe systems, which is the kind of documentation that exists so that a person under time pressure can find one specific answer and get back to work. That turned out to be unexpectedly good preparation for search. Both jobs are the same job: anticipate the question, structure the information so the answer is findable, and resist the urge to be clever at the reader's expense.
By the middle of the 1990s I was building websites in HTML by hand. This was before content management systems, before CSS handled layout, and before anyone had a reason to say the words front-end framework. A website was a directory of files you uploaded. If you wanted to know why a page behaved the way it did, you read the page. I still think that habit is the single most useful one in technical SEO, and I still meet teams who diagnose their site through a dashboard rather than through the HTML the crawler actually receives.
I have practiced organic SEO since 1996. My BrightonSEO organizer biography carries that same start date, which is one reason I publish the year rather than a running total of years. A start date stays true. A year count is stale the moment it is written, and I have watched my own bio boilerplate say twenty years for the better part of a decade at outlets that had no reason to update it.
1996 is also the year I bought my first domain name. I sold it two years later to a competitor in the employment sector. I did not think of that at the time as the beginning of a second specialty, but that is what it was: the name was worth more to somebody else than it was to me, and working out why is most of what domain name valuation and strategy turn out to be.
In-house first, then the agency side
In the early 2000s I moved in-house as the SEO for a telecommunications software company in North Dallas. In-house is an honest place to learn the discipline, because you cannot fire the client and the client cannot fire you. You live with the consequences of last quarter's decisions, including the ones that looked clever at the time. That role also produced my first conference speaking invitation, to a Search Engine Strategies event in Toronto.
What followed was the agency side, in this sequence:
- MarketNet — SEO Manager at a Dallas-area web design firm founded in 1995.
- Vizion Interactive — SEO Manager and then Senior SEO for several years. I wrote for the company blog during that period, and the author archive is still published there.
- Standing Dog Interactive — Director of SEO, running a group of roughly 25 Dallas SEOs. The firm was later acquired by wPromote. Running a group that size changes the job: you stop optimizing pages and start building the process by which twenty-five people optimize pages consistently, which is a different problem with a different failure mode.
- Globe Runner — Senior SEO Strategist and head of SEO, first in Lewisville and then in Addison, Texas. CircleID identified me as an SEO expert from Globerunner in a December 2014 article on new gTLDs and search, which is the third-party marker for that period.
- Advice Interactive — SVP of Agency Services, part of Advice Local.
I do not publish start and end months for any of these roles. The sequence is documented across my own sites and corroborated in places by third parties. The exact boundaries are not, and a biography that invents precision it does not have makes the same error as an SEO report that states a metric to two decimal places it never actually measured.
Hartzer Consulting
I founded Hartzer Consulting in 2016 and have run it since. The work divides into two halves that feed each other more than most people expect.
The consulting half is technical: audits, crawling and indexation problems, link profile analysis and link cleanup, website and domain migrations, and domain name strategy. Migrations are the work I am called about most often after something has already gone wrong, which is the wrong time to call, and I say so from stage and in writing as often as anyone will let me. A migration is the one project in search where the entire downside is concentrated in a single deployment window.
The other half is expert witness and investigative work, retained through counsel. It uses the same skills for a different purpose: reconstructing what a website looked like and ranked for at a point in time, reading server logs and analytics data as evidence rather than as a report, tracing domain registration and DNS history, and then explaining any of it to a judge or a jury in language that does not require them to already understand it. Expert engagements are routinely confidential, so I describe the practice and never a matter. There are no case names on this site and there will not be.
This site takes no engagements of any kind. Consulting and expert witness inquiries go to Hartzer Consulting, which is where scoping, the conflicts check, and the actual agreement happen.
Domain names: background checks, DNProtect and DNAccess
The domain side of my practice became formal in 2013, when I created an algorithm and a patent-pending process for performing a background check on an internet domain name. The premise is simple and the execution is not. A domain has a history; that history is partly recoverable from public sources; and a buyer who does not look at it is buying whatever the previous owner did with the name. Spam campaigns, malware distribution, a manual action, an abandoned trademark fight, a stint parked on a network nobody wants to be associated with — none of it announces itself at the point of sale. The process is patent-pending. I have never published a patent number for it, because I do not have one to publish, and patent-pending does not mean the same thing as an issued patent.
That research turned into services. Verified Domains was a domain name background check service launched in partnership with Globe Runner. In 2020 I co-founded DNProtect with Rob Monster; it automated my DNP Score algorithm and added domain warranty services, and in 2021 it added stolen domain name recovery. I served as Director of DNProtect. By my own count I have personally helped recover more than 500 stolen domain names. That figure comes from my own records and no third party has audited it, so treat it as what it is.
In March 2023 I founded DNAccess, which performs domain name background checks and stolen domain name recovery. Domain theft is a category of loss most people learn about during the week it happens to them, and in my experience the first forty-eight hours matter more than everything that comes after them.
DFWSEM, State of Search, and Search Engine Forums
In February 2004 I co-founded the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association with Jim Gilbert. The first meeting was sixteen invited local search professionals in a room at a Hampton Inn on I-35, the Stemmons Freeway, in North Dallas. I built and managed the first DFWSEM.org website. There was no local search community in North Texas at the time, and the reasonable expectation was that competitors would not sit in a room together and talk honestly about how the work is done. They did, and they still do, which is the part of this I am most pleased about.
DFWSEM has run the State of Search conference in Dallas for years. I chaired State of Search in 2020, the year the event ran virtually, and the conference announcement that October identifies me by that title and as co-founder of DFWSEM. I serve on the State of Search board, and the organization's site lists me as a board member as of 2025.
Earlier I was the administrator of Search Engine Forums, one of the industry's early discussion communities, now offline. That put me in the middle of several years of arguments about how search engines worked at a time when almost nobody could prove very much. It is a useful education for anyone who later writes expert reports, because you learn to keep three categories separate: what the data supports, what the community believes, and what a vendor is asserting.
Speaking, writing, and the tools I disclose
I speak at industry conferences and have since the early 2000s. The most recent independently documented appearance is BrightonSEO in September 2023, where I gave a talk called Advanced link profile analysis in 2023 and sat on the conference link building panel. Pubcon maintains a speaker biography for me. The full record, including the earlier portion that rests on my own speaking page rather than on a surviving organizer page, is set out on the speaking page of this site with the provenance marked.
I write, and I keep the list short and checkable. My confirmed bylines are Search Engine Journal, Practical Ecommerce, CircleID, and the Vizion Interactive blog from my employer years. I am quoted in other publications, including Search Engine Land, which is a different thing from writing for them and is presented that way on the publications page.
I am a brand ambassador for Majestic and for OnCrawl. The Majestic relationship goes back at least to 2014, when I delivered an Advanced Link Training session sponsored by Majestic and worked the Majestic ambassador booth at the Dallas Digital Summit. I disclose it in my biography rather than in a footnote, because link data and crawl data are the raw material of most of my analysis, and you are entitled to know which vendors I have a relationship with before you weigh my conclusions about their category.
My blog is BillHartzer.com, a site I set up in 2001 and started blogging on in 2003. I am based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas.