ToBeRemembered

If I knew best, I wouldn't be asking for help.

Accusing someone of chasing phantoms is not polite and awesome in general, never mind when the phantom is dancing around in front of them.

Google says results have been removed under data protection law in Europe on every relevant search query that previously included the site in question. No phantoms here.

At very least I'd have thought this is an interesting attack vector to think about.

Thanks for the link.

This is more or less the most useless reply possible.

No, it is not competitors advertising. Ads on Google Search are clearly indicated and there are none for the search terms tested.

No, the server is not under his desk (???). The server is a standard dedicated server hosted with a well-known provider. I checked it in terms of configuration (DNS, HTTPS), not with a voltmeter or whatever you have in mind.

No, dynamic content and SEO are not going to help when the site does not show up at all. Those are tools for improving ranking, not getting the site to show up whatsoever.

Let me put the question more simply: Assuming fraudulent RtbF requests are possible, how can they be identified and challenged?

The Right to be Forgotten can be (and I'd guess usually is) used selectively - you can ask Google to forget about the Twitter account you made when you were 13, while keeping everything else available.

Even if interest has waned, it's unclear to me why that would result in his website vanishing and not, for example, his profile on his employer's website (which is still one of the top results). It certainly doesn't explain why this would coincide with warnings about data protection in Europe. It seems like there's no way of finding out if those warnings are actually related, never mind contesting a takedown.