What this is
This is the machine-readable knowledge map for BillHartzer.net, published to the EntityMap v1.0 specification. It declares the entities this site is about — Bill Hartzer himself, the three disciplines, the twelve practice areas, the concepts they depend on, and the two-way split between consulting and expert witness work — each with an evidence passage taken from a real page and, where one exists, a link into the open knowledge graph.
The sameAs values matter more here than on most sites, because the purpose of this one is entity resolution: making it unambiguous which Bill Hartzer is being described. Every profile URL listed against the Person entity was fetched and confirmed. Deliberately absent are a Wikipedia article and a Wikidata item, because neither exists for him — the Wikipedia article for that surname is Brian Hartzer, an unrelated Australian banking executive — along with GitHub, Mastodon and YouTube URLs that could not be verified. An unverified identifier in a knowledge map is worse than a missing one, because a machine will believe it.
View the EntityMap JSON → (25 entities · EntityMap v1.0)
The entities
Bill Hartzer
Search engine optimization consultant, domain name specialist and internet expert witness. Practicing SEO since 1996; founder of Hartzer Consulting and of DNAccess; co-founder of DFWSEM; based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas.
Same as:
- https://brightonseo.com/people/bill-hartzer
- https://www.pubcon.com/bios/bill_hartzer.htm
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/author/bill-hartzer/
- https://www.practicalecommerce.com/author/bill-hartzer/
- https://circleid.com/members/7655
- https://bsky.app/profile/billhartzer.com
- https://speakerdeck.com/bhartzer
- https://www.stateofsearch.org/speakers-seo-speakers/bill-hartzer/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhartzer/
- https://x.com/bhartzer
- https://www.billhartzer.com/
- https://www.hartzer.com/
- https://www.dnaccess.com/
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
- RELATES_TO → Domain name
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
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.
About Bill Hartzer | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Who I am, in the shortest useful form I am Bill Hartzer. I have practiced search engine optimization since 1996 and worked with domain names for exactly as long, having bought my first one that same year and sold it to a competitor two years later. I run Hartzer Consulting, which I founded in 2016, and DNAccess, which I founded in March 2023 to do domain name background checks and stolen domain name recovery. I am based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas.
Bill Hartzer — SEO Consultant & Expert Witness — published by BillHartzer.net
Search
How search engines find a site, understand what it is about, and decide whether to show it — the technical layer underneath that, and the work of moving a site without losing what it had earned.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Bill Hartzer
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
How search engines find a site, understand what it is about, and decide whether to show it — the technical layer underneath that, and the work of moving a site without losing what it had earned
The Three Disciplines | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Domain Names
The domain name treated as infrastructure and as an asset: choosing and structuring names, the registrar and DNS records that actually control them, and getting a name back when it has been taken.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Bill Hartzer
- RELATES_TO → Domain name
The domain name treated as infrastructure and as an asset: choosing and structuring names, the registrar and DNS records that actually control them, and getting a name back when it has been taken
The Three Disciplines | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Legal and Investigative
Work performed for attorneys and for parties to a dispute — analysis of search, domain, social media and analytics evidence, and the investigative work that establishes who is behind a website.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Bill Hartzer
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
Work performed for attorneys and for parties to a dispute — analysis of search, domain, social media and analytics evidence, and the investigative work that establishes who is behind a website
The Three Disciplines | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexation, canonicalization, rendering and structured data — the layer that determines whether anything else you do can rank.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Search
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
Technical SEO is the part of the discipline that decides whether a search engine can reach a page, render it, understand what it is about, and keep it in the index. Everything else is downstream of that. Content quality, links and brand strength matter enormously, but none of them matter on a URL that never gets crawled, or that gets crawled and then quietly dropped. I have been practicing SEO since 1996, and the underlying pattern has not changed much. Most sites that underperform are not being penalized. They are being misread.
Technical SEO Consulting and Audits | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Website and Domain Migrations
Redirect mapping, DNS coordination and post-launch monitoring for replatforms and domain changes — including recovery when one has gone wrong.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Search
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
- RELATES_TO → Domain Name System
A migration is any change that moves URLs: a redesign with a new structure, a replatform onto different ecommerce software, a move to a new domain name, a merge of several sites into one, a split of one site into several, or a switch from HTTP to HTTPS. They all share the same risk. The addresses that search engines have indexed, that other sites link to, and that people have bookmarked stop resolving to the same content. Migrations fail for boringly predictable reasons. Nobody built a complete inventory of the old URLs.
Website and Domain Migrations | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Search Engine Marketing
Keyword and intent research, campaign structure, conversion measurement, and the coordination of paid and organic search so the two stop competing.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Search
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
Search engine marketing is the whole of being found on a search engine: the organic results, the paid results, and increasingly the answer surfaces that summarize both. I do not treat paid and organic as separate departments, because the person searching does not. They see one page of results and have no particular interest in which parts of it were bought. What I bring to it is a bias toward measurement and a long memory. I have been practicing SEO since 1996, which means I have watched a great many tactics work, get exploited, and then stop working.
Search Engine Marketing | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Domain Name Strategy
Naming and TLD choices, portfolio structure, acquisition diligence, and the registrar security that keeps a company's domains from being taken.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Domain Names
- RELATES_TO → Domain name
- RELATES_TO → Domain Name System
I bought my first domain name in 1996 and sold it to a competitor two years later, which taught me early that a domain is an asset with a market rather than a line item on a hosting invoice. Most companies still treat it as the latter. The name sits in a marketing team's shared account, renewed against a credit card that will eventually expire, with no written record of who controls it. That matters because so much depends on it.
Domain Name Strategy | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Domain Name Recovery
Investigating and recovering stolen or hijacked domain names using WHOIS and DNS history, registrar records, and the dispute processes that apply.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Domain Names
- RELATES_TO → Domain name
- RELATES_TO → Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy
Domain theft is not an abstract risk. A name is transferred out of an account, the nameservers change, and within minutes the website is gone, email stops arriving, and every service that authenticates through that domain — password resets included — belongs to somebody else. The business usually finds out from a customer. What separates it from other intrusions is the clock. Once a name has moved to another registrar, and then to another registrant, the informal routes back start closing, and what remains is slower and more expensive.
Domain Name Recovery | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Online Reputation Management
Branded search results, entity and profile control, review handling, and an honest account of what can and cannot be removed from a search engine.
Relations:
- PART_OF → Search
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
Online reputation management is usually described in emotional terms and solved in technical ones. What a person or a company means by my reputation is almost always a specific set of results on the first page for their own name, plus the review stars, the knowledge panel and the autocomplete suggestions sitting alongside them. That reframing matters, because it makes the problem measurable.
Online Reputation Management | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
SEO Expert Witness
What search data can establish about rankings and traffic loss, what it cannot, and how I document the difference
Relations:
- PART_OF → Legal and Investigative
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
- RELATES_TO → Search engine optimization
An SEO expert witness is retained to answer a narrow question in a way a decision-maker with no technical background can follow. The question is almost never was this good SEO . It is usually closer to: was the work described in this agreement actually performed; did this party's conduct cause the traffic decline being claimed; was the ranking that was promised achievable at all; was a competitor's brand term used to divert search traffic, and can that be shown from records rather than assumed from an outcome.
SEO Expert Witness | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Domain Name Expert Witness
How domain ownership, control and timing are reconstructed from registrar, registry and DNS records, and where that record runs out
Relations:
- PART_OF → Legal and Investigative
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
- RELATES_TO → Domain name
- RELATES_TO → WHOIS
Nearly every domain matter reduces to four questions. Who owned the name, who controlled it, when did each of those things change, and what was it worth. They sound simple. They are separated by a distinction that decides cases: ownership and control are not the same thing , and the public record shows control far more reliably than it shows ownership. A registrant name in a public lookup is self-asserted. Nobody at the registry verified it.
Domain Name Expert Witness | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Internet Expert Witness
How web evidence is collected, authenticated and timelined - and why archives, screenshots and IP addresses each prove less than they appear to
Relations:
- PART_OF → Legal and Investigative
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
Internet evidence has an unusual quality. It looks self-evident - here is the page, here is the date, here is the address it came from - and almost none of that is as solid as it appears. The page is a rendering assembled from parts, the date may belong to a crawler rather than to the publisher, and the address identifies a network endpoint rather than a person. Retained as an internet expert, my work is to collect that material properly, explain how each system actually produces its records, and then say what follows from it and what does not.
Internet Expert Witness | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Social Media Expert Witness
What platform exports contain, how far account attribution can honestly go, and why follower counts make poor damages inputs
Relations:
- PART_OF → Legal and Investigative
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
Social media disputes look varied and are technically repetitive. Nearly all of them come down to four questions: who posted it, when was it posted and for how long did it stand, how many people actually saw it, and is the copy in the file an accurate record of what the platform displayed. The last question is the one attorneys underestimate. Most social media evidence arrives as screenshots, and a screenshot is a picture of a rendering that anyone can alter in a browser in under a minute. It is not a platform record.
Social Media Expert Witness | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Web Analytics Expert Witness
Why analytics is a sample rather than a census, how tracking changes break comparisons, and how to reconcile traffic data with money
Relations:
- PART_OF → Legal and Investigative
- RELATES_TO → Expert witness
Analytics data shows up whenever a dispute requires a number: lost traffic in a business claim, conversion performance in an agency dispute, delivery and quality in an advertising matter, or audience size in a valuation. It gets used this way because it is the only quantitative record most businesses keep about their website, and because it produces clean-looking charts. That is precisely the risk. Analytics was built to support marketing decisions, not to serve as evidence.
Web Analytics Expert Witness | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Internet Investigations
Mapping the infrastructure behind online actors, with findings graded by confidence and evidence preserved to litigation standard
Relations:
- PART_OF → Legal and Investigative
- RELATES_TO → WHOIS
- RELATES_TO → Domain Name System
Not every online problem starts as a lawsuit. More often somebody needs to know what is actually happening before deciding whether there is anything worth pursuing: who is behind a site attacking a business, whether a group of storefronts selling counterfeits is one operator or twelve, whether a departing employee stood up a competing operation while still employed, whether a domain being acquired carries a history that will cause damage, or whether a review campaign is organic or manufactured.
Internet Investigations | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Search engine optimization
The practice of making a website into an answer a search engine is willing to give — reaching the page, understanding it, and choosing it over the alternatives.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
The practice of making a website into an answer a search engine is willing to give — reaching the page, understanding it, and choosing it over the alternatives.
Search Engine Optimization | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Domain name
An identification string that maps to a resource on the internet, held through a registrar under a registration record with its own access control, expiry and transfer state.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
An identification string that maps to a resource on the internet, held through a registrar under a registration record with its own access control, expiry and transfer state.
Domain Names | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Expert witness
A witness whose specialised knowledge lets a court receive opinion evidence on a question the fact-finder cannot be expected to answer unaided.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
A witness whose specialised knowledge lets a court receive opinion evidence on a question the fact-finder cannot be expected to answer unaided.
Expert Witness Work | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Domain Name System
The hierarchical naming system that resolves domain names to addresses, and the layer at which a hijacked name is most often repointed.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
The hierarchical naming system that resolves domain names to addresses, and the layer at which a hijacked name is most often repointed.
Domain Name Strategy | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
WHOIS
The query and response protocol that publishes registration data for a domain name, and the historical record most often relied on to establish who held a name and when.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
The query and response protocol that publishes registration data for a domain name, and the historical record most often relied on to establish who held a name and when.
Domain Name Background Checks | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
The organisation that coordinates the domain name system's namespaces and sets the policies registrars operate under, including the transfer and dispute policies.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
The organisation that coordinates the domain name system's namespaces and sets the policies registrars operate under, including the transfer and dispute policies.
Domain Names | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy
The ICANN policy for resolving trademark-based domain name disputes — a narrow remedy that is frequently, and wrongly, expected to solve outright domain name theft.
Same as:
Relations:
- RELATES_TO → Bill Hartzer
The ICANN policy for resolving trademark-based domain name disputes — a narrow remedy that is frequently, and wrongly, expected to solve outright domain name theft.
How Stolen Domain Names Are Recovered | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Consulting
Advisory and project work undertaken directly with a business: technical SEO, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, domain name strategy, domain name recovery and online reputation management.
Relations:
- INCLUDES → Technical SEO
- INCLUDES → Website and Domain Migrations
- INCLUDES → Search Engine Marketing
- INCLUDES → Domain Name Strategy
- INCLUDES → Domain Name Recovery
- INCLUDES → Online Reputation Management
Advisory and project work undertaken directly with a business: technical SEO, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, domain name strategy, domain name recovery and online reputation management.
Consulting | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net
Expert Witness and Investigations
Work retained through counsel and producing written analysis and opinion: SEO, domain name, internet, social media and web analytics expert witness engagements, and internet investigations.
Relations:
- INCLUDES → SEO Expert Witness
- INCLUDES → Domain Name Expert Witness
- INCLUDES → Internet Expert Witness
- INCLUDES → Social Media Expert Witness
- INCLUDES → Web Analytics Expert Witness
- INCLUDES → Internet Investigations
Work retained through counsel and producing written analysis and opinion: SEO, domain name, internet, social media and web analytics expert witness engagements, and internet investigations.
Expert Witness and Investigations | BillHartzer.net — published by BillHartzer.net