Bill Hartzer
Internet expert, consultant, and expert witness. More than 25 years in search engines, domain names, online reputation, and internet investigations.
Background
Bill Hartzer has spent more than 25 years helping organizations improve their online visibility, protect their digital assets, and resolve technical problems involving search engines, websites, digital advertising, and domain names. He is the founder of Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess, and advises clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
His work spans the intersection of search engines, domain names, digital advertising, internet infrastructure, web analytics, cybersecurity, and online reputation management. That breadth is the point: most of the problems he is brought in on sit between two disciplines, which is exactly why the previous consultant did not find them.
Areas of work
- Technical SEO (search engine optimization) — crawl and indexation, site architecture, canonicalization, structured data, JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals, log file analysis, and technical audits.
- Website and domain migrations — more than 20 years and hundreds of migrations: rebrands, domain changes, CMS and platform moves, HTTPS, international consolidations, and recoveries after migrations that went wrong.
- Domain names — portfolio management, acquisition, valuation, DNS, registry and registrar matters, DNSSEC, and domain security.
- Domain recovery and security — stolen, hijacked, improperly transferred, expired, and disputed domains, and the preventative controls that keep them from being lost in the first place.
- Online reputation management — how a person or a company appears in search results and on review platforms, what is driving the result, suppression and displacement of damaging content, and the monitoring that catches a problem while it is still small.
- Internet and online defamation — identifying and documenting defamatory content, attributing anonymous posts, reviews, and websites to their source, preserving evidence in a form that survives challenge, pursuing removal and de-indexing, and supporting counsel through the technical side of a defamation matter.
- Expert witness services — SEO, SEM, Google Ads, web analytics, website traffic analysis, domain ownership, online defamation, and internet marketing matters, including expert reports and testimony.
- Internet investigations — historical website analysis, WHOIS and DNS history, website attribution, and forensic internet research.
Reputation and defamation work is technical before it is legal. The question is usually not whether something is damaging — that part is obvious to everyone involved — but who published it, when, from where, what it is connected to, and whether any of that can still be proved months later. That is an investigative problem, and it is the part that gets skipped.
Published by Hartzer Press
The Unofficial Ballot — Trust, Risk, and Taking Sides in a Divided Era. Forthcoming, 2026.
Elsewhere
Consulting work, expert witness engagements, reputation and defamation matters, and domain work are handled through Hartzer Consulting, separately from any book. He writes about search, domains, and internet policy at billhartzer.com.