A friend of mine is a semi-successful researcher with a semi-common German name. Over the past few months, citations of his work have dwindled and this seems to coincide with a large reduction in visitors to his website from Google Search.
Initially he assumed that this was due to a misconfiguration and asked me to check things over, ensure his server hadn't been compromised, and so on. This was a dead end - everything seems to be in order and the Google Search Console reports no issues.
However, I have noticed that when I search his for name or phrases from his site, Google informs me that "some results may have been removed due to data protection law in Europe". Links to his website do still show up sometimes, but only if very specific search terms are used.
My theory is that one of the people who share his name (which includes another researcher and an author) has filed a fraudulent Right to Be Forgotten request in order to bump themselves up the search results, but neither of us have any way of proving this or even finding out what that notification actually refers to.
He is understandably upset by this, and I'd like to help him so I'm asking HN: Short of changing his name, is there anything he can do?
Morality of paid promotions of academic research aside, it would seem to me that the "Algorithms" would favor promoted materials due to a greater "distinct visitors" count and resultant shares.
Also without knowing the specifics the statement "Check things over, ensure his server..." stands out a bit.
I may be way off on this but suspect this indicates a private physical server possibly located at the researchers office/home? Again, I may be totally wrong but expect the web crawlers favor faster and less latent remote hosted servers over private ones. Especially if there is intermittent and or varying bandwidth on these systems, and issues with security certificates.
I also believe that more dynamic content by including feeds related to the subject matter would greatly improve site and search rankings as well as encourage return visits.
These things could be dismissed or confirmed quite easily and a fairly low cost. If it seems dishonest to pay for promoting their research. Could they justify it by considering the advertising campaign as research in itself?
I am certain there are far more knowledgeable SEO experts who peruse HN and I could be completely incorrect but still feel looking into these things would be a much better use of time and effort rather than chasing phantoms who may or may not be attacking them.