About Bill Hartzer

A Career Built on Search Engines, Data, and the Infrastructure Between Them

I'm Bill Hartzer, founder of Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess. For more than 25 years I've worked with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies on technical SEO, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, domain name strategy, and internet infrastructure. That work has put me inside thousands of websites, domain portfolios, and analytics accounts, and it has given me a working, current understanding of exactly how content moves across the internet: how it gets indexed and cached by search engines, how it spreads across platforms, and how — despite what most people assume — it disappears.

Earlier in my career, I worked in-house as an SEO and webmaster at an international telecom software company, where I managed and optimized websites in multiple languages and coordinated with teams across regions. That role gave me a firsthand view of how search visibility and online content directly affected sales, partnerships, and product adoption — not as an abstract metric, but as something that showed up in quarterly numbers and lost deals. That operational grounding, combined with more than two decades of independent consulting since, is part of what I bring to litigation: an understanding of how these issues actually play out inside a business, not just how they look from the outside.

Internet defamation litigation sits squarely at the intersection of those disciplines. Investigating a defamatory post, review, or video isn't purely a legal question; it's a technical one. Where was it published? Who published it, and can that be established to a defensible standard? Has the content been indexed or cached anywhere? Is it still live, and if not, where might a copy still exist? What did the content actually do to search visibility, traffic, and revenue, measured against a proper baseline? Those are the questions my engagements are built to answer, and they are the same questions that determine whether a defamation claim survives summary judgment and performs at trial.

Quick Facts

From Technical SEO Consulting to Expert Witness Work

My expert witness practice grew directly out of my consulting work. Attorneys and businesses began retaining me to investigate and explain search engine behavior, domain ownership, and online advertising practices in the course of disputes, and internet defamation matters followed a similar trajectory. Time and again, cases turned on questions that required someone who understood both the underlying technology and how to translate it for a non-technical audience: was this review actually left by a customer, can this anonymous poster realistically be traced, why isn't this profile in the Wayback Machine, and what did this content actually do to the plaintiff's search rankings and revenue.

I've handled that kind of forensic internet investigation work for law firms across the country in matters involving domain disputes, UDRP proceedings, and SEO/SEM litigation, and I bring the same investigative discipline — and the same willingness to say plainly what the evidence does and doesn't support — to internet defamation engagements.

I take engagements from both plaintiff's and defense counsel. My conclusions follow the evidence and the methodology, not the retaining party, and I say so explicitly in every report and every deposition.

I Am Not an Attorney

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