About Bill Hartzer and This Site

What I do, and when I started

My name is Bill Hartzer. I have worked on search, domain names and internet investigations since 1996, which means I have spent that time on the technical side of how information about a business gets published, indexed, ranked, copied and found — and on what happens when the information is wrong.

Most of the work is unglamorous and it is all the same skill. Finding where a piece of content actually lives and who runs the server it lives on. Reading a platform's published policy properly, on the day, rather than from memory of what it said two years ago. Capturing a page in a way that will still mean something in a year. Working out whether a set of accounts is one person or six. Reading search data closely enough to say what it does and does not support.

None of that requires a law license, and none of it substitutes for one.

How I ended up writing about attacks on businesses

Reputation attacks arrived through the technical door. A company would ask why a complaint page had appeared in third position on a search for its own name, or why a review had vanished from a star rating while remaining perfectly visible one click below, or why a forum thread nobody had looked at for two years was suddenly the second thing a customer saw.

The pattern repeated. By the time the question reached me, the business had usually spoken to at least one firm promising that the content would be taken down, sometimes for a fee payable on success. In a large share of those matters the operator of the platform had already published, on its own help pages, that the thing being sold could not be done by anybody. The business had not read that page. Nobody had shown it to them.

That gap is why this site exists. A frightened owner reading fast deserves to know what the operator itself says before deciding what to spend.

What I am not

I am not an attorney. Whether a statement about your company is legally defamatory, whether to bring a claim, what a claim might be worth, and what to do in a courtroom are questions for a defamation attorney. Nothing on this site is legal advice, and reading it creates no engagement of any kind. Where the boundary comes up on a page, it is named there and the page moves on.

I am also not a removal service, and this is worth being plain about because the distinction is easy to blur. Whether content comes down is decided by an operator, a publisher, or a court — never by the person you hire. What can be done is to work out which route each item has, argue it in the terms the operator actually applies, and say honestly which of them has no route at all. Anyone offering something firmer than that is describing a decision they do not get to make.

Why the site is written the way it is

Two rules govern every page here and both cost more to follow than to ignore.

Every page names something that will not work. A true statement does not come down because it is damaging. A court record, or an accurate report of one, does not come down because it is old. Some operators publish that they do not remove content at all. A review that breaks no rule on the platform it sits on is not going anywhere, whatever it says. Content on a site with nobody at the other end has no route to speak of. Saying that first is the only thing that makes the rest of a page believable.

Operator policy is quoted and dated. Where a page tells you what a platform does, it quotes the platform's own words and gives both the operator's update date and the date the page was read. Policies change constantly and without announcement, which is exactly why a claim about a platform with no date attached is worth nothing. Check the operator's current page before acting on anything here.

The site is also written for people who will never make contact. That is not generosity; it is the only version that works. A page that hedges to protect an enquiry loses to the firm that promised removal, and deserves to.

What you will not find here

No client names, no case studies, no before-and-after screenshots. Matters like these are confidential by nature, the businesses involved have no interest in being named next to the words that damaged them, and a case study with numbers in it is unverifiable by the person reading it anyway.

No statistics without a source. Where a figure appears on this site, the study is named, along with its date, what it actually sampled, who ran it and whose interest it serves. Several well-known numbers in this field are widely repeated in a form that reverses what the underlying research found, so the studies here are described with their limits attached rather than borrowed for their authority.

No prices, either. What a matter takes depends on how many items there are, how many operators are involved, whether evidence still exists, and how much was already sent before anyone looked at it — so cost is described by what drives it rather than quoted as a figure that would be wrong for most readers.