Introduction
I am Bill Hartzer. I have worked in search for more than twenty-five years, across four overlapping fields that turn out to inform each other constantly: search engine optimization, domain names, internet investigations, and expert witness work in litigation involving websites, domains and online evidence.
I have been a Majestic Brand Ambassador for over fifteen years. Majestic maintains one of the two large independent maps of the web's link graph, and that relationship is the reason a great deal of the analysis on this site is possible at all — I have been looking at link data at scale, continuously, for longer than most link building agencies have existed. I am the founder of Hartzer Consulting, and of DNAccess, which handles domain name recovery and related work.
Why this site exists
The good material on link building is scattered, and most of it is selling something.
That is the whole reason. There are excellent individual articles out there, written by people who know exactly what they are talking about, sitting on the blogs of companies whose business model requires the article to end in a product. There are conference talks that never get written down. There are things every experienced practitioner knows that appear in no document anywhere, because the people who know them are busy and the people who write are usually writing for marketing departments.
The result is that somebody trying to learn this properly has to assemble it from forty sources, half of which contradict each other and most of which have a commercial reason to overstate one tactic. I have watched people do that badly for two decades and end up buying links because a well-designed page told them to.
So this is the whole thing in one place, in order: fifty lessons across nine modules, thirty-four tactic profiles with a risk grade on every one, sixteen reference guides, a glossary, and nine downloadable checklists. It is free. There is no signup, no email gate, no account, no certificate to buy and no upsell at the end. It is published by Hartzer.com, which is where I have written about this industry for a very long time.
The evidence base
Most link building advice is asserted rather than demonstrated. I wanted this course to rest on something I could actually show, so the evidence base for a significant part of it is an analysis of my own site's link profile: 1,301,839 links from 22,260 referring domains, measured in Majestic, on a site where no link was ever bought. Not one. That last point is what makes the data worth anything — it is a picture of what a genuinely organic profile looks like after twenty years, which is exactly the thing nobody publishes.
Some of what it showed was unflattering, and those parts are in the course too:
- 69.3% of my 22,260 referring domains are Trust Flow 0 — Majestic's lowest trust score — on a profile where nothing was purchased. If you have been told a profile full of low-trust domains is proof somebody bought links, that is not what the data says.
- Only 446 referring domains, 2.0% of the total, are Trust Flow 41 or above. Over roughly twenty years, that is about twenty-two strong domains a year.
- The top 100 referring domains account for 84.3% of all links, and a single domain sent 219,159 of them — 16.8% of the entire profile — through one sitewide link. Link counts are far less meaningful than they look.
- 49.6% of all links ever recorded are gone. The median referring domain stops linking after about 1,080 days. And 717 referring domains at Trust Flow 21 or above have stopped linking entirely.
- Of the lost links, 97.4% disappeared while the source page was still perfectly reachable. Only four out of 645,202 were lost to a 404. Links die from editing, not from sites going away.
- Survival scales with trust: Trust Flow 0 domains have a median lifespan of 859 days; Trust Flow 61 and above run to 3,353 days. Roughly four times longer.
I published the parts that undermine tidy advice as readily as the parts that support it, including my own. A dataset you only quote when it agrees with you is not evidence, it is decoration.
How the site is written
Three rules, applied throughout. No invented numbers — where I do not have a figure, I describe the mechanism instead, and where the industry genuinely disagrees I say so rather than picking the version that suits my argument. No prices in prose — cost is described structurally, because figures go stale and stale figures are worse than none. Willingness to say a thing is a bad choice — nine of the thirty-four tactics are graded high risk or obsolete, several of them are sold commercially by real companies, and I have put my name to those grades.
A reference that only flatters is not a reference. That is the standard the whole site is written to, and it is the reason it is worth reading rather than the forty pages it replaces.