Defamation and Harmful Search Results
In defamation matters, courts often need to understand how harmful online content appears in search results and how frequently it is likely to be seen by users. Bill analyzes historical and current search results, rankings, and click behavior to provide context around exposure and impact.
These cases may involve individual professionals, executives, or companies whose names or brand terms produce damaging search results that influence reputation, referrals, and business opportunities.
Organic Traffic Loss and Damages
Many disputes arise when organic search traffic drops significantly after a redesign, domain change, SEO campaign, or platform migration. The key question is usually whether the decline was caused by specific SEO decisions, broader algorithm changes, or other external factors.
Bill reviews analytics, search console data, technical changes, and timing to explain likely causes and assess whether damages claims align with the available data.
Domain Name and DNS Disputes
Some matters center on domain ownership, DNS changes, or disputes about the value of a particular domain asset. SEO evidence can help show how a domain was used, how much traffic it generated, and how search engines associated it with particular topics or brands.
Bill evaluates historical usage, backlink profiles, search visibility, and site content to describe the domain’s role in search results and business performance.
Technical SEO Failures and Site Migrations
Technical SEO failures are common flashpoints in disputes between businesses and vendors. These often involve site migrations, URL changes, CMS switches, or large-scale redesigns.
Bill focuses on crawling, indexing, redirects, canonicalization, and architecture to determine whether technical changes likely contributed to ranking and traffic declines. See the Technical SEO Expert Witness page for more detail.
E-commerce SEO Disputes
E-commerce sites have unique SEO challenges, including product variants, category hierarchies, filtering, and complex tracking. Disputes may involve losing organic visibility for key product terms, mishandled migrations, or incorrect implementations of structured data.
The E-commerce SEO Cases page provides deeper discussion of issues specific to online retailers.
Local Search and Map Pack Disputes
For local service businesses, presence in local search packs and map listings can drive a large share of leads. Disputes often involve sudden disappearance from local results, mistaken suspensions, or inconsistent data across listings.
Bill’s local search work is discussed further on the Local Search Issues page.
SEO Malpractice and Negligence
When businesses allege that an SEO provider’s actions were negligent or fell below professional standards, the court needs context on what those standards reasonably were at the time. These cases may involve aggressive link-building, thin content strategies, or risky technical shortcuts.
The SEO Malpractice & Negligence page explains how Bill evaluates tactics relative to accepted practices and documented guidance.
Forensic SEO and Evidence Preservation
In many disputes, key site changes and SEO decisions happened months or years earlier. Forensic SEO work involves reconstructing what was done, when it was done, and how those changes affected search performance. This often requires careful use of archives, logs, and backups.
Learn more on the SEO Forensics and File Preservation in SEO Litigation pages.
Determining Whether a Case Needs an SEO Expert
Not every dispute involving a website requires an SEO expert witness. However, when rankings, visibility, and organic traffic are central to the claims, an expert can help interpret data, explain technical issues, and connect evidence to the legal questions at hand.
To decide whether an expert is appropriate, many attorneys start with the