About Bill Hartzer, SEO Expert Witness

Where the search work started

Bill Hartzer has worked in search since 1996. The first of it was in-house: he was the SEO and webmaster at an international telecommunications software company, responsible for search performance and for the website content itself, in multiple languages, for audiences in different countries.

That is an unusual place to start and it shaped everything after it. An in-house role means you own the consequences. You are not handing a recommendation to a client and moving on; you are the person who has to explain why traffic moved, reconcile what the analytics say with what the servers say, and live with a template change for the next two years. Running content in several languages for several markets adds the problem that gives international SEO its difficulty: a page that is correct in one market is the wrong page to serve in another, and the mechanism deciding which one a search engine shows is technical, fragile, and invisible to the business.

He later founded Hartzer Consulting, which does search and digital marketing work for clients, and he also runs DNAccess, a domain name security and recovery practice. The two overlap more than they appear to: a domain name is the asset a search presence is built on top of, and questions about who controlled a domain, and when, turn up in search disputes constantly.

What the expert work has consisted of

He has been retained as an expert for more than eight years. The record of that work is set out below and is kept current. He has testified in United States Federal District Court and in the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands.

Those numbers are stated here because they are what counsel asks about in the first email, and because they are the honest shape of the practice: many more reports than depositions, many more depositions than trials. That ratio is normal for this discipline and worth understanding when you are budgeting. Most matters that need a search expert resolve on the written analysis, or on what the analysis shows is not there.

No case name, caption, court beyond the two named above, client, docket number, or outcome appears anywhere on this site. That is a deliberate editorial decision, and the reasons for it are set out at the end of this page.

Both sides of the caption, including rebuttal

The work is taken for plaintiffs and for defendants, and the two postures require different habits of mind. Building an affirmative causation opinion means assembling a record and defending every step of the inference. Working the defense side is usually the opposite exercise: finding the step the other side skipped, the confound they did not test for, the date range that quietly excludes the inconvenient months.

He also takes rebuttal assignments against other experts in this discipline. A rebuttal report is not a second opinion on the same question; it is an examination of somebody else's method — what data they used, what they did not use, whether the comparison period is defensible, whether the tool they relied on measures what they say it measures, and whether the conclusion follows from the exhibit it sits next to. Doing that work regularly is the fastest way to learn where opinions in this field break.

Still doing the work, which is the point

He still runs search engagements for clients today, which is not a marketing detail; it goes to qualification.

Search changes on a schedule nobody controls. Core algorithm updates land several times a year, reporting interfaces are rebuilt and retire the metrics an older opinion was written against, and AI-generated answers above the organic results have changed what a first-position ranking is worth in a way no historical benchmark accounts for. An expert whose hands-on practice stopped years ago can describe how search worked then. Reading an export produced by an interface that did not exist when that expert last logged in is a different demand.

The subject matter of the practice is the subject matter of the testimony: technical audits, site architecture, international SEO, link analysis, penalty and recovery work, paid search, web analytics, and domain names. He has consulted on website and domain migrations for more than twenty years, including recovering sites after a failed one — the fact pattern behind a large share of the disputes described on this site.

The disclosure lists are maintained, not assembled later

Rule 26(a)(2)(B) requires two lists from a retained expert, and they are the two that get transposed most often.

• Rule 26(a)(2)(B)(iv) — qualifications, including all publications authored in the previous ten years.
• Rule 26(a)(2)(B)(v) — all other cases in which, during the previous four years, the witness testified as an expert at trial or by deposition.

Publications: ten years. Testimony: four years. Both lists are maintained on an ongoing basis and provided to retaining counsel on retention, before the report is drafted, rather than reconstructed under deadline pressure at the end of an engagement.

There is a practical reason for that. A testimony list assembled from memory in the week the report is due is where omissions come from, and an omission on that list invites a motion that has nothing to do with the merits of the opinion. Counsel evaluating an expert is entitled to see both lists early enough that a conflict or an inconsistency surfaces while there is still time to act on it.

Writing and speaking

He writes and speaks publicly about search, domain names, and digital marketing, and has done so throughout the period covered by the ten-year publication list. Published writing is a mixed asset for an expert. It demonstrates that the opinions offered in a report are the opinions held generally. It also hands opposing counsel a decade of your own sentences to read back to you, which is what a competent cross-examiner will do.

So public writing has to be treated as though it will one day be an exhibit, because in this practice it sometimes is. That standard is applied to this site: nothing here is written to be defended later, only to be accurate now, sourced to the rule or primary document it came from, and revised when the authority changes.

What this site is, and what it deliberately leaves out

This site is a reference on how search evidence meets the rules of evidence. It sells nothing, quotes no prices, and is not a case-study portfolio. Where a page describes what happens in a matter, it describes the mechanism and the failure modes structurally — what class of problem it was, what data answered it, what the opinion depended on — and never who.

The omissions are consistent and they are worth naming so you are not left wondering:

• No named clients, captions, dockets, or courts beyond the two identified above.
• No outcome claims. An expert does not win a case, and a page that says otherwise gets read aloud in a deposition.
• No fees or prices. Cost is described structurally, so it cannot go stale.
• No competitor names and no rankings of experts or tools. Naming a tool as a data source is a fact; ranking it is marketing.

Consulting and expert engagements are handled through Bill's practice at hartzer.com, not through this site. What retention involves, and what counsel should do before making contact, is set out in the guidance on engaging an expert.

Working in search since

1996

Expert reports

36

Depositions

8

Trials

5

Arbitration

1

Credential figures last reviewed 2026-08-11.