Google has officially responded to the claim by some that they are censoring the answer to a question on their Google Home devices. Earlier today, I wrote about how Google Home may be censoring their answer to “Who is Jesus Christ?“. [Read more…]

If you’re reading this post and you’ve been reading my posts for a while now, then you probably have noticed that I’ve made some changes to the site recently. Actually, I’m making some major changes, and I’d like you to follow along with me as I split this website, BillHartzer.com, into two separate websites. This website, my primary blog and personal brand, is going to remain as it has, and always have been: a blog and “news site” dedicated on Search, Marketing, Tech, and Domain Names. I’ve moved my primary consulting business over to Hartzer.com, and a new business, Hartzer Consulting. [Read more…]

I am proud to officially announce that I have been chosen to as the OnCrawl Brand Ambassador for the United States. If you’re not aware of OnCrawl, OnCrawl is an SEO crawler and log file analyzer that helps you improve your SEO performance. I use OnCrawl as a critical part of the SEO audit services, Mini SEO Audits, and Technical SEO Audits I do for clients on a regular basis. [Read more…]

Are you sick and tired of being retargeted? Have you gone to a merchant’s website, maybe a hotel website or even some other ecommerce business and now their ads are following you all over the internet? Even on Facebook? For days on end? Literally, it can be very frustrating, especially if you are already a customer. Retargeting is great for business (I tell clients to implement retargeting during an SEO audit), but it honestly can be really annoying in some cases. [Read more…]

The results are in for the SEO Hero contest by Wix, and the New gTLD domain names have a great, strong showing in the results. Wix ran a good old fashioned SEO contest, where the winner would receive $50,000. Essentially, on a certain date, after four months’ time, whoever ranks #1 for the phrase SEO Hero will win $50,000. [Read more…]

It’s hard for me to calculate how many people currently make money online in one way or another. I estimate that we’re most likely talking about millions upon millions if you add up all of the freelancers, online entrepreneurs, search engine marketers, SEOs, internet marketers, bitcoin investors, domain investors, bloggers, soforth. [Read more…]

How to Tell If Someone is a Engine Optimization Expert
How to Tell If Someone is a Social Media Marketing Expert

I’m mad, and at the same time I can’t exactly make up my mind about the title of this post. If you know me, I’m almost never mad and frustrated like I am right now as I write this post. What’s gotten me steamed is the fact that there are so many self-proclaimed “experts” out there who are NOT experts. And it’s shame that it’s these very folks who are giving the whole digital marketing industry a bad rap. [Read more…]

This is an example of the newsletter that I send out on a regular basis. Here’s the latest edition, for June 2016. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do so at the end of this post.

I truly has been a few months since I have sent out my newsletter, and I have a lot to share this time. It’s certainly getting hot here in Texas, and we’ve had a lot of Spring storms and rain. It’s been heating up in the marketing world, as well. [Read more…]

It’s been been a while since I send out my newsletter. If you are one my newsletter subscribers, this is the type of content that you’ll receive in my monthly newsletter. [Read more…]

Wait, what?!? Yes, you read that headline right. In the latest legislative session, the State of Texas approved legislation that requires certain businesses to link to them with specific anchor text. I’ve heard of websites suing other websites for linking to them, but this, in fact, is just about the opposite of that. [Read more…]

I’ve always considered the Yahoo! home page a place with family-friendly content. But lately it’s becoming more family un-friendly. So much so that I’m reconsidering my usage of Yahoo! as a home page for my web browser. Especially because my school age kids use my laptop from time to time to browse the web. How is it that a Tweet from Twitter, along with a pretty nasty swear word gets listed as a news story on the site’s home page? [Read more…]

Every so often, when I attend and speak at conferences, I put together a list of speakers to see or speakers that I want to meet at that conference. So, since the Pubcon Austin conference is on April 20, 2015, being held, of course, in Austin, Texas, and since I’m speaking and moderating, I thought I would post my personal list. [Read more…]

Whenever sending a sales letter to someone, even an unsolicited sales letter (aka spam), then you will have a lot more success if your grammar is correct. [Read more…]

Well, this is interesting. Or embarrassing. Apparently, somehow Square is associating me, of all people, with boosting Domain Authority. I mean, according to Square, who sent me a marketing piece in the mail, I run a company called To Boost Domain Authority. Does this indicate that you can use Square to Boost Domain Authority? Take a look at what Square just sent me: [Read more…]

An interesting trademark filing has been done by a company owner who originally got bad advice. Specifically, this website owner claims that they got bad keyword advice from Trademark.com and LegalZoom.com. They had originally advised the company owner to insert keywords into the name of the trademark such as Best Flavored Funnel Cakes in the World rather than the company name, which is Carnival Food Year Round. [Read more…]

After actively doing SEO since the mid 1990s, and not just talking and speaking about SEO but actually doing it, I consider myself to be an SEO Expert. But, I have to admit that there are times when even this search engine optimization expert needs some advice. Back when SEO was “easy” (was it ever really easy?), one could use more of a formulaic approach to SEO and be fairly successful with any website that you were optimizing. But, as the search engines have become smarter, and those programming the algorithms have cracked down on spam more and more, there are times where you’re at a loss as to why a website is not ranking as well as it should. It’s in these times when only a truly professional SEO expert can “suck it up” and admit that you need help. [Read more…]

I’ve been using LinkedIn for at least 10 years now. And it’s been a great platform for connecting with business contacts, and networking. But to be honest with you, ever since LinkedIn’s IPO, there have been a lot of changes. I really like the fact that you can publish articles on LinkedIn. I’ve heard reports that LinkedIn is great for generating sales leads. I don’t do that, but I do get my share of sales pitches. It’s this most recent sales pitch that I just had to laugh at. This is, by far, the biggest epic LinkedIn sales fail that I have ever seen, though. [Read more…]

Well, have you ever actually thought about it? What technically happens, “behind the scenes” so to speak, when you use your keyboard, type Google.com into your web browser, and hit the enter (return) key? Have you ever thought about it? Well, someone over at GitHub has actually posed that question. And thanks to lots of people’s contributions, we actually are close to having the correct answer: [Read more…]

Google Cache Date a Month Old Now, Google Rolled Out Mobile Friendly Tag, and State of Search conference Last Week. There are a few significant updates this past week, including the Google Cache Dates, and the new Mobile Friendly Tag.

Google Cache Dates
Last week several people, including myself, noticed that the Google cache date on pages is about a month old. Typically, for most websites, the Google cache date is normally about a day old or maybe a few days old. But I checked several websites and it appears that the cache date is about a month old. This might be an indication that Google is up to something, like another major algorithm update coming soon. Whatever the case, it’s not normal. More info on my blog post. I also show you how to check your cache date, as well. [Read more…]

This past week, I’ve been busy speaking at the PubCon conference in Las Vegas, so there weren’t a lot of posts and updates this week. But, notably the TopSEOs website appears to have been banned in Google. I also posted about speakers I wanted to see at the PubCon conference, which was a great success. In case you’ve missed it, you might want to check out SocialCentiv, a really cool new Twitter marketing software product. [Read more…]