About Bill Hartzer

Who I am, in one paragraph

My name is Bill Hartzer. I have worked in search since 1996 — how pages get found, why one result appears above another, and what the companies running those systems publish about their own rules. That began as marketing work. A large part of it now is the other side of the same knowledge: what happens when the thing being found is a person, and the person cannot live with it.

I work as an independent consultant. I am also retained as an expert witness in internet matters, which means attorneys hire me to examine online evidence, explain what it shows, and then answer for that explanation while somebody paid to disagree takes it apart.

I am not an attorney. That sentence is on this page because it is load-bearing, and I come back to it below.

What being cross-examined does to the way a person writes

The habit that comes out of expert work is simple and it shapes every page here. If you write a sentence you cannot source, somebody will ask you where it came from, in public, and there is nowhere to go.

So the rule on this site is that a claim is either quoted from the operator's own published document, with the date the document was read, or it is labeled as unknown. When a platform's help page settles a question, its words are on the page and you can go read them yourself. When nobody publishes an answer — which in this subject is often — the page says nobody publishes an answer, and names who would have to.

That is why you will not find a timeframe here for how long a removal takes unless an operator printed one. The familiar figures in this market — results in thirty days, ninety days for a campaign — are not published by anyone. They may be somebody's honest experience. They are not documentation, and a frightened person deserves the difference.

Not an attorney, and exactly where that stops me

Naming the boundary is more useful than repeating a disclaimer, so here it is in practical terms.

Questions that are for a lawyer and not for me: whether a statement about you is legally defamatory, whether to send any kind of demand letter, whether you have a claim worth bringing, whether a record can be sealed or expunged in your circumstances, what a court might order and against whom, and how to dispute a background-check report under the statute that governs those reports.

What is left on my side is factual and it is a great deal of what you actually need first: what exists under your name and at which addresses, what each operator's published policy says it will and will not act on, who makes the decision on each item, what the operator has published about how long anything takes, and what a search for your name would still return if every available route succeeded. None of that requires a law license and all of it changes what you do next.

When a question crosses the line mid-conversation, the right answer is to say so and stop, rather than to give you an opinion dressed as information.

Why this site tells you what will not come down

Every competitor in this market promises the same thing, in the same order, to everyone who calls. Removal. Fast. Guaranteed. It works as marketing because the person calling is frightened and has usually not slept much.

This site is built the other way around. Pages here say plainly when there is no route at all, and they name the person or the system that actually decides, which is almost never me and almost never you. A court record does not come down because somebody was paid. An ordinary blog post that breaks no rule has no removal route anywhere. A truthful news article is an editor's decision, and most editors say no.

I am not doing that to seem trustworthy. I am doing it because the alternative is taking money for work whose outcome I would then have to explain away, and because the person who reads a page saying “this one is not coming down, here is what genuinely helps” is the person worth talking to. The commercial argument and the honest one point the same direction here, which is rarer than it should be.

Who I am writing for

A private individual who searched their own name and found something they cannot live with. Not a company, not a brand, not an attorney evaluating an expert.

That reader is different in a way that changes the writing. You are not managing a reputation as an asset; you are worried about a specific hiring manager, a landlord, a parent at your child's school, or somebody you are about to meet. You do not want a methodology and you should not have to learn one. You want to know four things, in this order: does this kind of thing come down at all, who decides, what will it take, and what should I do today.

So the pages here are organized around what you found and where people are finding it, and each one leads with the answer instead of making you read to the end for it.

What I do not do

• I do not promise removal, a ranking or an outcome. Not in a conversation and not in a document. The operator decides, and I am not the operator.
• I do not buy placements or manufacture reviews. Paid placement that passes ranking credit is named in a search engine's own spam policies, and the Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, in effect since October 21, 2024, prohibits fake and AI-generated reviews and purchased social media indicators — with guidance stating that liability can reach reputation management companies.
• I do not register your assets to myself. If a site on your own name is worth building, the domain, the accounts and the credentials are yours from the first day. A layer you do not own can vanish the day you stop paying for it.
• I do not sell a monthly program with no deliverable. If nobody can say what will be produced this month, nobody can tell whether it was.
• I do not give legal advice. See above, twice.

How to check any of this

Do not take a stranger's word for a stranger's honesty, including mine. Two things here are checkable in a few minutes.

First, every operator quotation on this site names the operator and the date the page was read. Open the source and read the surrounding paragraph. If an operator has since changed its policy, the operator is right and this site is out of date — policies here are quoted as they read on a date, and they change without notice.

Second, hold any proposal you have been given, from anybody, against what the search engine itself tells consumers about hiring in this field: no one can guarantee a top ranking, be wary of a company that is secretive about what it intends to do, and complaints about deceptive practices go to the Federal Trade Commission. That test costs nothing and it settles most decisions before they cost anything either.

Where to start

If you have just found something and you do not know what it is yet, start by reading the page here that matches what you found, and keep your own dated copy of it today, before you contact anybody at all.

If you would rather ask a person, the next step is an assessment: what is out there, which parts have a real route, who decides each one, and whether anything further is worth paying for. Sometimes that answer is no, and hearing it early is the cheapest thing on offer.