Disclaimer

What the guides on this site are

Mabank.net publishes a fair amount of writing: guides to domains and hosting, explanations of how local search works, pages about the towns around Cedar Creek Lake, and notes on the things small businesses get sold that they do not need. All of it is general information, written for a general reader who owns a small business in one part of Texas.

It is not advice about your specific situation. We have not seen your website, your domain records, your books, your contracts or your market. A page written for a category of business cannot account for the facts of yours, and the gap between the two is exactly where expensive mistakes happen.

If a decision has real money or real risk attached — a domain dispute, a contract with a former developer, a migration that could take an established site offline, a tax question — the right move is to describe your actual circumstances to somebody who can look at them. That is a conversation, not an article. We are happy to have it, and if the right answer is a lawyer or an accountant rather than us, we will say so.

Search engines are a moving target

Any statement on this site about how a search engine behaves is a description of something that changes without notice and without an announcement.

Search engines update their systems continuously. Documentation is revised, features are launched and quietly withdrawn, and behavior that was reliable for years can change in a week. Some of what search companies publish is genuinely useful and some of it is deliberately general. Nobody outside those companies has the full picture, including us, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.

So read anything here about ranking factors, local results, business profiles, indexing or algorithm behavior as accurate to the best of our understanding at the time of writing, and subject to change afterward. We update pages when we learn that something has changed, but there is always a lag between a change happening and it being reflected here.

Two specific cautions. First, be skeptical of any precise-sounding rule about local search — a fixed mileage radius, a fixed number of listings, a fixed weighting between factors. The mechanics that are documented are documented loosely, and the precise versions circulating online were invented by somebody. Second, rules governing domain names and certificates are set by policy bodies and change on their own schedule; where a page here describes a lock period, a lifetime or a deadline, confirm it before relying on it for a transaction that matters.

No guarantee of rankings, traffic or revenue

We do not guarantee that any website will rank in a particular position, attract a particular amount of traffic, generate a particular number of leads, or produce a particular amount of revenue. Nothing on this site should be read as such a promise, including anything describing what we have done for other clients.

The reason is not caution. It is that organic search placement is not for sale, is decided by systems nobody outside the search company controls, and depends heavily on things a vendor has no influence over: how many competitors you have, how established they are, how much demand exists in your category, and whether people around Cedar Creek Lake are searching for what you sell at all. In several of the towns we serve, the honest answer is that the search volume for a given service is very small, and no amount of work manufactures demand that is not there.

Neither can anyone else. If a company guarantees page one, first-page placement, a number of leads a month, or a specific rank for a specific phrase, that is the clearest available signal about how the rest of the engagement will go. Usually the guarantee is quietly attached to phrases nobody searches for, which are easy to rank for and worth nothing.

What can honestly be described is the work: what will be done, when, and what it is intended to achieve. That is what our quotes describe, and results are reported as what actually happened rather than against a promise that should never have been made.

Not legal, tax or financial advice

Nothing on this site is legal advice, tax advice, accounting advice or financial advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship of that kind. We are a web hosting and web design company.

This applies with particular force to anything on this site about sales tax, including the material on the ecommerce pages. Sales tax on internet sales is genuinely complicated: what is taxable varies by what you sell, rates vary by jurisdiction and change, rules about where a sale is sourced and when an out-of-state seller must collect have shifted significantly in recent years, and remedies for getting it wrong involve penalties and interest. Anything we write about it is background reading intended to tell you which questions to ask. It is not a determination of what you owe.

Take those questions to a CPA or a tax professional, or to the Texas Comptroller's office directly. The same applies to contracts, ownership disputes over a domain or a website, employment questions, privacy obligations under a specific statute, and anything with a filing deadline attached. A web company that answers those questions confidently is doing you a disservice, whatever it costs.

External links, accuracy and errors

External links are not endorsements. Where we link out, it is because the linked page is a useful primary source — official documentation, a government agency, a standards body, a city or county site. It does not mean we endorse the organization, its products, its other content or its business practices. We have no control over external sites, their accuracy or their availability, and we are not responsible for what happens on them. A page that was correct when we linked to it can change or disappear.

Accuracy is checked, not warranted. We try hard to get this right. Facts about towns, counties and institutions come from public sources, and technical claims are checked against documentation from the organization that publishes it. Even so, sources contain errors, figures are revised, situations change, and we make mistakes like everyone else. Content here is provided as-is, without warranty of accuracy, completeness or fitness for a particular purpose, to the extent the law permits.

Tell us if something is wrong. If you find an error on this site — an outdated fact, a broken link, a claim that no longer holds — email agency@hartzer.com or call 214.236.4378. Corrections are made promptly and gratefully, and a reader who catches a mistake has done us a favor.

Any decision you make based on something you read here remains your decision, and its consequences are yours. That is not a disclaimer we are hiding behind; it is a reason to call and ask before acting on a page rather than after.