Informational purpose
Everything published on BillHartzer.net is provided for general information. It is a professional record and a description of a practice, written for prospective clients, retaining attorneys, conference organizers, journalists and colleagues who want to know who Bill Hartzer is and what the work involves.
It is not advice. It is not a recommendation for your website, your domain portfolio, your dispute or your business. It is written for a general reader with no knowledge of your circumstances, and general writing cannot account for the particulars that usually decide the answer. Where a page describes how something is normally done, read that as a description of typical practice rather than as an instruction addressed to you.
No guarantee of results
Nothing on this site should be read as a promise, guarantee or prediction of any outcome. Not a ranking, not a traffic level, not a revenue figure, not the recovery of a domain name, and not the result of any dispute or proceeding.
Search results are produced by systems that are controlled by search engine companies, changed without notice, and contested continuously by every competitor in a market. No practitioner controls them, and anyone who tells you they can guarantee a position for a competitive term is either misdescribing their work or misunderstanding it. The same applies to domain name matters: registrars, registries, hosting providers, marketplaces and dispute panels all make their own decisions under their own policies, and the best-run recovery effort can still fail on facts nobody could change.
What competent work can do is improve the odds, remove self-inflicted problems, and make the position defensible when something goes wrong. That is a materially different claim from a guarantee, and this site makes only the smaller one.
No engagement is formed by reading this site
Reading this site, following a link on it, quoting it, or sending an email in response to it does not create a consulting relationship, an expert witness engagement, an attorney-client relationship, or any duty of confidentiality.
Consulting and expert witness work is undertaken only through Hartzer Consulting, under a written engagement, and expert engagements are entered into through counsel rather than directly with a party. Before that agreement exists, there is no obligation to review anything, no protection attaching to what you send, and no relationship of any kind. Unsolicited material sent to a prospective expert may not be treated as confidential and can create a conflict that disqualifies that expert from a matter, which is a poor outcome for the sender. Do not send case facts, documents or privileged material before an engagement is in place and a conflicts check is complete.
Professional opinions are specific to the facts of a matter
An expert opinion is formed on a record: the documents produced, the data preserved, the systems examined, the questions actually posed by counsel, and the methodology applied to all of it. It is not formed on a web page, and it cannot be extracted from one.
Nothing on this site is an opinion about your matter, and no statement here should be quoted as an expert opinion in any proceeding. Where general views appear about how search engines behave, how domain transfers occur, how analytics data should be interpreted, or how link profiles should be read, those are professional views expressed in general terms and held subject to revision as the facts of any particular matter come in. The same technical phenomenon can support very different conclusions depending on the evidence, and an expert who reaches the same conclusion regardless of the record is not doing the work.
Any opinions expressed on this site are Bill Hartzer's own. They are not the opinions of any current or former employer, client, conference organizer, publication, tool vendor, or organization with which he is or has been associated.
Content reflects practice at the time it was written
Search and domain names are fast-moving subjects. Ranking systems change, sometimes several times a year and sometimes without any announcement. Registrar and registry policies change. ICANN policy changes. Tool vendors change what their metrics measure, which quietly changes what a chart means. Browser and platform behavior changes underneath all of it.
Every page here reflects the state of practice as understood when it was written. A description that was accurate then may describe behavior that no longer occurs. Older items in the publication and speaking records are left in place with their dates attached rather than removed, because deleting the parts of a record that have aged makes the record less honest, not more current. Treat dates on this site as load-bearing, and check anything technical against current documentation before you act on it.
Third-party names, tools and disclosed relationships
Company, product, conference and publication names used on this site belong to their owners and appear for identification and citation. Their appearance does not imply endorsement, affiliation or sponsorship in either direction, except where a relationship is stated.
Two relationships are stated, because they are relevant to how you should weigh certain conclusions: Bill Hartzer is a brand ambassador for Majestic and for OnCrawl. Link data and crawl data are the raw material of much of the analysis described on this site, and a reader is entitled to know which vendors in that category he has a relationship with before weighing his views on the category. Disclosure is the right response to that, not silence.
Links to third-party sites are citations of sources, not endorsements. Their content, accuracy and availability are outside my control, and a source that supports a statement today may move, change or disappear tomorrow.
Sourcing, self-reported facts and what is deliberately absent
This site distinguishes between what a third party documents and what only Bill Hartzer documents, and it labels the second category in the text. Speaking engagements confirmed by an organizer are listed separately from those drawn from his own speaking page. Bylines are listed only where an author archive exists; being quoted by a journalist is presented as a citation rather than as authorship. Figures that come from his own records, such as the number of stolen domain names he has helped recover, are attributed to him rather than presented as audited.
Several things a promotional biography might include are absent on purpose. Specific matters are never named or described here, in any detail at all, because expert engagements are routinely confidential and a biography has no business implying litigation it cannot cite. There is no count of expert witness engagements. There is no mainstream-press logo wall. There is no fixed number of years of experience, only the 1996 start date. The absence of those items is a statement about the standard applied here, and it should be read that way rather than as an omission.
Getting an answer that applies to you
If you need a view on your own situation, the general material here is the wrong instrument, and no amount of reading will convert it into the right one. Technical, strategic and expert work is performed through Hartzer Consulting under a written engagement, and stolen domain recovery and domain background checks are handled by DNAccess. For legal questions, consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction; that is not a deflection but the correct division of labor, since the technical questions and the legal ones are genuinely different and answering one does not answer the other.
This disclaimer may be updated at any time, and the version published here is the version that applies. Last reviewed August 2026.