This site is a record, not a business. BillHartzer.net publishes Bill Hartzer’s professional history and practice. It sells nothing, quotes nothing and takes no engagements — consulting and expert witness inquiries go to Hartzer Consulting.

BillHartzer.net logo mark — the professional record of Bill HartzerBillHartzer.netThe professional record of Bill Hartzer
Where to send what

Contact

This site is a record rather than a booking page, so here is where each kind of inquiry actually goes

Abstract orbiting dot illustration representing Contact

Where to send what

I maintain four websites and they do genuinely different jobs. Sending an inquiry to the wrong one wastes your time, so here is the map.

  • Consulting and expert witness inquiries go to Hartzer Consulting, at hartzer.com. That includes technical SEO, migrations, link analysis, domain strategy, and any retention through counsel.
  • Stolen domain name recovery and domain background checks go to DNAccess, at dnaccess.com. If a domain has just been taken, go straight there rather than through me here.
  • Writing, industry news and commentary live at BillHartzer.com. If you are a journalist looking for what I have said about a subject, that is the archive.
  • This site, BillHartzer.net, is the biographical record: professional history, speaking, publications, and descriptions of the practice areas. It is where you verify a claim, not where you start an engagement.

Why this site does not take engagements

A biography that also sells is neither. The moment a record of someone's history exists to convert a visitor, every claim on it acquires a motive, and a reader is right to discount it. This site is meant to be the boring, checkable version: the dates, the sources, the separation between what a third party confirms and what only I assert. It does not publish rates, take a brief, or promise a response time.

There is a practical reason too. Consulting work needs a scoping conversation before anyone can say anything useful about approach or timeline, and expert witness work needs a conflicts check before I can hear the substance of a matter at all. A biography page is the wrong place for a lawyer to start typing facts about a live case.

Consulting and expert witness work: Hartzer Consulting

Everything commercial runs through Hartzer Consulting. That covers technical SEO audits, crawl and indexation work, link profile analysis and cleanup, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, online reputation work, and domain name strategy.

It also covers expert witness and investigative engagements, which are entered into through counsel rather than directly with a party. The sequence is a conflicts check, then a discussion of scope and posture, then a written engagement. If you are an attorney making first contact, include the type of matter, the jurisdiction, the posture and your deadline, and please do not send facts or documents before the conflicts check is complete.

Stolen domains and background checks: DNAccess

If a domain name has been stolen, transferred without authorization, or hijacked at the registrar or DNS layer, go to DNAccess, which I founded in March 2023 and which does this work specifically. Speed matters more here than in almost anything else I do. Evidence at registrars, hosts and email providers is time-limited, transfers become harder to unwind the longer they sit, and a name that has been resold once is a materially harder problem than one that has not.

DNAccess also performs domain name background checks, which grew out of the algorithm and patent-pending process I created in 2013. If you are about to spend real money on an aftermarket name, checking what the name was used for before you owned it is the cheapest part of the transaction.

Writing and commentary: BillHartzer.com

My blog is BillHartzer.com, set up in 2001 and blogging since 2003. It is where I publish industry news, analysis and opinion on search and domain names. If you are a journalist looking for prior comment from me, or an organizer gauging how I think before extending an invitation, that archive answers the question faster than an email will.

The contact link on this site

The contact link here composes a message in your own email client rather than submitting a form to a server. Nothing you type is transmitted to this website, stored by it, or passed to a third party, because there is no form handler behind it to do any of those things. The message goes from your mail client to my inbox in the ordinary way, and it is subject to your own email provider's policies rather than to anything happening here.

If your device has no default mail application configured, the link may not open anything at all. The tradeoff is deliberate: no form handler means no stored submissions, no spam queue and no third-party service holding your message. If nothing opens, use the appropriate business site above.

This composes the message in your own email client and sends it to [email protected]. There is no form handler behind this page: nothing you type is transmitted to, or stored by, this website. If no mail application opens, write to that address directly.

Frequently asked questions

Can I hire Bill Hartzer directly through BillHartzer.net?

No. This site is the biographical and professional record; it does not sell services, publish rates, or accept engagements. Consulting and expert witness inquiries go to Hartzer Consulting at hartzer.com, and stolen domain recovery and domain background checks go to DNAccess at dnaccess.com. Sending a request here only adds a step, because I will route it to the correct property before anything can happen with it.

How should an attorney make first contact?

Through Hartzer Consulting, and with the conflicts check first. A useful opening message states the type of matter, the jurisdiction, the procedural posture, and the deadline you are working against, without case facts or attached documents. Once the conflicts check clears, we can discuss scope, what data would need to be preserved or produced, and whether the question you have is one I am actually the right expert to answer. Sometimes it is not, and it is better to establish that early.

What happens when I click the contact link on this site?

It opens a new message in your own email client with my address filled in. Nothing is submitted to this website: there is no form handler, no database, and no third-party form service in the path, so the site never sees what you write. If your device has no default mail application set up, the link may not do anything, in which case use the contact route on the relevant business site instead.
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