Looking for a new web host for your website? Or you’re going to move your website to another web host? Well, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has a list of four questions to ask when hiring a web host provider. The effort here is applauded. But, unfortunately, the FTC didn’t exactly get all the terminology right, which would lead to even more questions. Or a small business looking dumb in front of their web host provider. Here’s the graphic they put out, and here’s their tweet. [Read more…]

Update: ClixSense has been sold to a company called Prodege, and re-launched as Ysense.com on August 1, 2019.

ClixSense, an online rewards website, and i-Dressup.com, a dress-up games websites, have agreed to settle with the United States Federal Trade Commission that they failed to take reasonable steps to secure consumers’ data. They both allowed hackers to hack into their websites and get customer data. The two websites are not connected with each other. [Read more…]

A company called Web Host Agents is sending businesses an invoice for web hosting services. The problem is that the invoice is fake, and Web Host Agents doesn’t currently host the company’s website. It’s a fake invoice, a sales tactic that’s being disguised. One of my clients received such an invoice recently in the mail. They asked me if it’s a scam or not–to which I promptly replied, telling them that it is. Let’s take a look at the invoice, which does look convincing. [Read more…]

The payments from the class action lawsuit Opperman v. Kong Technologies are being sent out. If you were a member of the class, and you opted to receive your payment in the form of an Amazon gift card, then you may have received or will receive the Amazon gift card today. I personally received mine–in the amount of $59.31. I believe I was one of the first ones to fill out the proper paperwork, as I was a member of the class identified in the lawsuit. [Read more…]

As I’m sure you’re aware by now, on May 25, 2018, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) went into effect. There are still a lot of questions that US-based businesses have, including whether or not they have to comply with GDPR or not. I did write a post titled What is GDPR, which you’ll probably want to read. [Read more…]

Google has launched a new feature in Google Search Console that allows web site owners to request a Recrawl of their own web site. I suspect that this is in response to web site owners, such as myself, complaining over the past few weeks about Google’s slowdown in indexing. Google announced this feature on Twitter. [Read more…]

Whenever there’s a great search engine marketing or search marketing industry conference, I personally take the time to review all of the speakers. Just recently, I hand picked the speakers to see at Pubcon Austin. Especially when it’s a great conference, such as SEMPDX’s Engage conference, which is being held on Thursday, March 8, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. I spoke at last year’s Engage conference, and the year before that–and it’s a great one-day conference to attend. [Read more…]

A bug in Grammarly’s Google Chrome web browser extension was exposing all of your documents to virtually anyone or any website that wants to view them. If you’ve used Grammarly’s Chrome extension, all of the documents (including websites, documents, MS Word documents, including Microsoft Office documents) have been exposed to the public.

If any of the documents that you’ve used Grammarly on to check spelling or plagiarism are of a sensitive nature, then you probably should be concerned about this security breech.

Update: this has been fixed and user login details are no longer exposed. However, if you have any documents that are of a sensitive nature in your Grammarly account then you may want to remove them. Also, in any case like this, I urge you to go change your login details (change your password) at Grammarly.

[Read more…]

As you might recall, I decided to split my website into two separate websites. I moved content (mainly my services pages) over to Hartzer.com, leaving my 1000+ blog posts here on this blog. I’ll continue to blog and write news articles here on BillHartzer.com. The goal is to make BillHartzer.com more of a blog and news site–while moving my SEO Consulting business over to Hartzer.com and Hartzer Consulting. [Read more…]

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…]