Bill Hartzer
@bhartzer
Followers
21,439
Following
760
Media
3,866
Statuses
93,923
SEO Consultant & Domain Name Expert. Practicing SEO since 1996. Speaker, Blogger, CEO of Hartzer Consulting.
Colorado Springs, CO
Joined April 2007
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Pinned Tweet
Hiring an SEO? Technical SEO Audits shouldn't be a part of the proposal. But they're a must before any ongoing SEO work is done. Here's 7 Steps to Hiring an SEO Consultant
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Facebook being down makes me think of all of those small businesses who never built websites. They rely on traffic and publicity from their Facebook pages only.
It's so important to diversify, such as building a website and doing SEO.
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I'm still amazed that an SEO firm can buy 525 expired domain names, redirect those domains to their site, and Google rewards this with top organic rankings, very quickly.
All those domains are totally off-topic, and have nothing to do with SEO.
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@DenverChannel
@LizGelardi
@TonyKovaleski
The housekeeper should throw out the first pitch at the game.
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Pro tip: turn on accessibility on your twitter account, and you’ll have a place to add a description to photos you upload. Will help them rank in twitter search results.
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Google Bard suggests that to rank higher in Google you "can build backlinks by guest blogging, creating infographics, and participating in online forums."
What century are we in?
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Google's now showing favicons (your site logo) next to your SERP listing on mobile. I just changed my favicon to this, just to mess with them.
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How I made my Google organic search result look like a Google ad.
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I'm happy to report that
@bill_slawski
's SEO By The Sea website will live on, and continue to be up and running for at least the next 2 years.
This is separate than what
@siteground
originally offered.
A few have been working diligently "behind the scenes" to make this happen.
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Google's search results are, in my opinion, so bad--some of the worst that I've seen in years.
Here's an example: Google Translate ranking--clicks on the result of a *Google URL* leads to redirects to other spam sites (and possibly malware).
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Wow, Google's banning the distribution of 'misleading content' on Google *DRIVE*. So, this shows that Google reads the content of files you've uploaded to Google Drive.
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This poll is going around (it was posted in LI) about how much SEO audits should cost.
Are you serious? If someone is paying $250 or less, or even saying they should be "free", then that's insane. It's not an audit, it's a report that's been spit out from a some SEO tool
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What is something ancient that only an SEO veteran can remember?
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I requested a link from a very authoritative website 3 years ago. They just added that link today. Never give up!
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When someone asks me for SEO advice, I don't send them my Calendly.
Instead, I send them a link to Open Table so they can make reservations at my favorite restaurant.
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Last week I heard that our local county Food Bank didn't have a website, and thus no way for people to donate online. Got in touch with them and it's now live. Just my way of giving back in a time like this.
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Google can’t pass its own page speed and core web vitals tests.
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For those of you who are going to edit the social icons on your website to change the Twitter bird to X, be assured that it’s now safe to also remove the Google Plus icon at the same time.
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I can't emphasize this enough. Web design firms, Digital Marketing agencies, and SEO firms should NOT own the domain name of their clients' business. Clients always should have full control over the domain name.
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The definition of "impression" has gotten so bad. There's no way a human saw this site over 100 times in the SERPs if it ranks 158th. They didn't click on the 15th page of the results and see the site in the results.
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Has anyone noticed that Google's not displaying the number of pages indexed when you use the site:domain .com search operator?
Is this new
@rustybrick
?
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I asked ChatGPT to write a script for a short video about a certain topic and include certain keywords.
I copied results into Lumen5 and Lumen5 created the video within a few mins.
I put keywords into the title of the video, uploaded to YouTube, and it was ranking in minutes.
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Just launched Hartzer Domains (domain name marketplace) .
If you have a domain you want to list for sale, let me know.
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I saw someone post, "I got this new SEO client, paying me $10,000 a month for SEO. I'm not sure how to do on-page SEO for them or do an audit of their website. Can you help?" Really?!?
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Google just announced the March 2024 spam updates, and now I'm hearing of at LEAST 25 domains/sites that have received manual action penalties for "pure spam".
So Google's not just dealing with it via algo updates, they're penalizing sites and giving them manual actions.
If you
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Not too much longer and this place up in the mountains in CO will be ours. So much looking forward getting out of "the city".
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If I was hiring someone for an SEO position, what question(s) would you ask them?
I'll start:
What is the Google Florida update and why was it such a significant part of SEO history? (If they can answer that, then I'd hire them on the spot.)
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Please give me some advice. Not on any particular topic, just a random piece of advice.
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If you don't have a Knowledge Panel entry for your personal name, company name, or your "brand", or if you don't like what's displayed there:
I can't emphasize enough how much adding schema markup on your site, and specifically Organization schema markup will help the situation.
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This is SO cool.
@majestic
has launched their Typo Domain tool. Put in your domain (or any domain) and see all of the 'typo' domains that have links.
In my case (billhartzer .com), a site links to me but they misspelled my domain. So I'm not getting the benefit of the link. All
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SEO Expert Bill Hartzer Interviewed on CBS TV News
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Have you ever seen a massive PBN link network like this?
This law firm's site is actually in the bottom right, highlighted in yellow.
There is a small PBN to the right of it.
But the top left is a massive PBN, linked through 3 links that point to this law firm's home page.
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Thanks Google, for converting over to continuous scrolling in the SERPs.
All SEOs: "We can now guarantee that you'll be on the first page of the Google results."
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Pro Tip: Don't register a domain name after midnight. It's probably not your best idea.
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I'm starting my 4th year as an SEO & Domain Name Consultant. If you have doubts about leaving your current gig and working for yourself, I'm proof that it CAN be done successfully. I originally had my doubts, but it's been 4 years... Ask me anything about it!
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Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack
I give all the credit to
@lilyraynyc
for originally finding the spam and posting about it, with example keywords.
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When I got laid off in 2016 I relied on my side hustle for income. Now 7 years later, my side hustle continues to be my full-time job.
#SideHustles
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I can never emphasize this enough. It's unethical for a web design firm, web developer, or SEO firm to ask you to transfer the domain name to them. This is another way those firms end up stealing a domain name.
#domains
You do NOT need to transfer your domain to your web designer, web host, or someone else. They don't need to *own* your domain in order for them to do their work. If they request you transfer your domain name, please do NOT do that. In many cases they'll steal the domain from you.
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Here's one of link networks of what
@lilyraynyc
is referring to regarding the "craigslist used auto parts" search query at
@Google
.
Along with a few others. Courtesy
@Majestic
link graph.
If you currently Google "craigslist used auto parts," every single result in the top 20 is spam, minus the first two results from Craigslist.
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Potential Client: Tell me about your SEO experience.
Me: I started doing SEO in the late 1900s....
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1 week after I deleted my
@googlemybiz
listing: Google traffic is up 23 percent. Direct traffic up 35 percent. Overall site traffic up 30 percent. No major change (up or down) in tracked rankings according to
@semrush
.
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I'm giving up on the site: search operator at Google.
Why? It's not accurate. It gives you false info. Not accurate at all.
Here's what I did just now to check:
1. Searched Google for site:.
2. Used the SERP bookmarklet
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A few years ago, I got a "really good", natural link from a company's blog. They misspelled my last name and linked to that misspelling.
So I registered the misspelling/typo of my last name and 301 redirected it to my site.
Every year I renew that domain--the typo of my name.
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First time I've had to mention
@inlinks
as an SEO expert witness report in a legal case.
One company is suing their SEO firm, saying that No SEO was ever performed on their website.
Looking at Archive(.org), I can see the Inlinks code installed on the company's website. I also
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In 20+ years of blogging, one thing that I've always been able to do well is identify 'breaking news' in an industry and post quickly about it.
Be the first to 'break the news' so to speak, and get a blog post out there, and get it crawled and indexed first. Then, if necessary,
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OMG
@googlemybiz
this is crazy. You suspended a listing and told biz owner to create a new listing. Then, in response to the reinstatement request, you say that you won't reinstate because there is a duplicate listing w/same details. **That you told the biz owner to create!**
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I think there’s some 70s rock star on my flight. But I don’t recognize him. Anyone know who he is?
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My client just won a UDRP. All SEOs need to pay attention to this particular decision. Why? Let me explain.
A golf course was owned by a family for many years (since the 1970s). The golf course had a website, the name of the golf course. They had a website.
At some point, they
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My father took this photo of me back in the 1970s when I was a kid.
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The "Fetch and Render" tool, Google's "Fetch as Google" tool is now officially gone as of today.
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When I was an in-house SEO doing SEO in 9 different languages, I reported to the CMO of this international company.
I explained to the CMO that we couldn't rank if we didn't publish content on the website (and of course optimize those pages). She really didn't care about that
I see many newer SEOs discredit the work of agency/in-house SEOs, often because they don’t have as many hockey stick growth patterns to share.
Fun fact, many sites looked like that in the beginning. 😅
The harder part (IMO) is continuing that growth after years.
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Company Christmas party this evening. Ugly xmas sweater contest. I think I won.
(My company has only 1 employee: me!)
Happy Holidays, everyone!
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Starting some SEO related work on a B2B website.
The copyright date in the footer is 2012, so I'm assuming that it hasn't been updated since then.
The site is still http and not HTTPs.
The site isn't mobile friendly. Very old web design.
Yeah, these sites still exist.
And
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Someone should create a service where you can add a small 'button' that indicates "No AI"... on your website.
When clicked it takes you to an AI detector that checks if it's AI generated content.
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I'm finishing up writing a very lengthy legal report this evening (I've been hired as an expert witness in a legal case).
I'm including screen captures of search engine results pages of search queries related to this legal case.
I can't go into specific details about the case,
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Remember this stolen domain name from April 5th?
The domain name finally was put back into my client's
@netsolcares
account today.
Another successful domain name recovery by my agency's
@DNAccess
service.
It took about 10 days to get the stolen domain name back.
Now that
This is a crazy one, hopefully I can get it all in one long tweet:
One service I provide, which I have to say I’m quite good at, is stolen domain name recovery.
Company contacts me Saturday, their domain is stolen. Hacker hacked into
@netsolcares
account, turns off 2FA,
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I did some data analysis using
@Majestic
of 80,000+ expiring domain names.
One of the calculations I like to do is look at the Trust Flow and subtract the Citation Flow (i.e., TF-CF).
The "worst" domain in terms of link spam I found was this one. The TF is 8 and the CF is 45,
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I'm very happy to report that we (
@dnprotect
) have successfully recovered another stolen domain for one of our clients.
In this case it was a valuable LLL domain (3 character, all letters, domain) that was stolen a few years ago.
#domains
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Wow, this makes my blood boil. SEO agency has this graphic on their site--telling prospective clients that they're a Google Certified SEO Partner. They're not. One of their employees is an AdWords qualified professional. So much is wrong with this.
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5 years doing SEO, 10 years doing SEO, 15 years doing SEO, and 20 years doing SEO.
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Give me some SEO advice. A tip, a trick, or just plain old fashioned "SEO best practices".
I'd love to hear your advice, I'm sure me (and others) could benefit from it.
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A couple of weeks ago, I spent about a week in Brighton at
@brightonseo
.
My biggest 'takeaway' from attending BrightonSEO is the fact that digital marketing agencies in the UK (and across Europe) do SO much more "digital PR" (outreach to journalists/reporters/media) than
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What's the best practice now for paginated pages?
Example would be /category/product/?page=2
Should page 2 be canonicalized to /category/product/ page?
Or should they be self-referencing canonicals, and let Google figure out how to deal with the paginated pages?
Or
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I have an SEO client that's been paying me with pork sausage for over 10 years.
They're a livestock farm, and they raise pigs (and cattle, goats, chickens, etc.).
What alternative payment methods do you accept?
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@JohnMu
Hey John, that's a great question: I actually removed my
@GoogleMyBiz
listing & address on my site and got better results. Google had me tied to a particular location, whereas my clients are actually worldwide. I explained it all in my post:
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I'm writing a lengthy article called, "The Dark Side of Domain Names". No one really ever hears about "the dark side".
This includes expired domain names, stolen domain names, people losing domain names, and the shady (dark) practices of some domain registrars.
There's a lot
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Manipulation of Google's Auto Suggest feature has led to a lawsuit. This is an interesting one, and goes to show why you probably don't want to engage in manipulating auto suggest.
There are two different companies that are highly competitive with each other. I'll call them
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9 years ago today, in 2012, I got a photo with
@mattcutts
at SES.
@BruceClayInc
walked by, and
@mikegrehan
is there too.
#SEO
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Sometimes you have to be patient in order to get links.
I sent an email request for a link to a client site 12 years ago.
I used my personal email to send the request.
I got an email saying they just added the link to the client site.
That client hasn't been a client in 8
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Google is so broken. Example: N. Carolina SEO company creates *doorway page* for "Dallas", phone # and contact info on site is for NC. Yet Google's ranking it for Dallas. User intent is local (by including 'Dallas', looking for a local co, not a NC biz). Seeing this often now.
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@CyrusShepard
Having no url in serps opens up a whole other issue like phishing, trust, etc. How do we know we are clicking on the brand site and not an imposter site? Url is not displayed.
@schachin
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Web developer wants $130/hr to put
@googleanalytics
code (that I provide them) on a site. I'd do it, but they won't give me access to the site. It's a one-time copy/paste onto the checkout page of an ecommerce site.
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Do you think we need more Full Stack SEOs?
Or should SEOs specialize (specialize in on-page, audits, links, etc.)?
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I created a very simple, easy to use bookmarklet that scrapes the search engine results.
Just add a bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar and add the Javascript code.
Then when you're viewing a Google results page, click the bookmark. It gives you all the URLs in that search
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Post on Reddit? Reddit user content is being sold to an AI company in a $60M/year deal.
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So, Google (manually) replaced the "Ad" favicon I had as my favicon with the default. But now, the mobile SERPs result for "Bill Hartzer" now looks like this:
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