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No going to lie, the first half of the post I started to think to myself: "Is this another post about how Google has victimized some poor website? Surely Gianluca isn't writing something like this."
Then I plowed through and said to myself: "Yes Google. WTF?" No joke. Seriously, that one email poorly reflects on their reconsideration request process. I usually attempt to come at issues with a non-biased approach so I can look at both sides. I can't with this. That is just extremely poor on Google's part.
So they support only English? Wow. I just have sent a request last week in German. Why? The form was German too. They are penalizing sites and make it look like you can appeal the process. In reality Google is not only judge, jury and executioner but they will even judge you without understanding you and you have no way to reverse the decision. This only shows how condescending the Google monopolists are by now. At least they could inform you that they support English only BEFORE they make you send a request in a different language.
In the case of my friend, the reconsideration link is sending to the English form.
The fact that in you case it was in German makes me suppose that German is supported... hopefully for you.
I posted on Hacker News what actually happened here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4781416 I'll copy/paste the comment here too:
The explanation for this is actually quite straightforward. Google fights spam in 40 different languages and we absolutely take reconsideration requests in many different languages, including Italian, French, German, etc. We've also improved our reconsideration requests in the last few months to tell webmasters whether the requests have been granted or whether the website still has issues in our opinion.
People have told us that they'd like to have additional feedback though--not just a "yes/no" type of answer. So we've been experimenting with giving more in-depth answers. I discussed the experiment in this video we published a couple weeks ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rsWc78dits#t=1m36s (watch from 1:36 to 1:56 or so).
Now you know enough to understand what happened in this case. This person, after violating our quality guidelines, had done multiple reconsideration requests. His English-language reconsideration request was selected to get a more personalized response, but then when the Googler started to investigate the site, the actual site was in Italian. That's what triggered the "this language is not supported" message because the person handling the case was expecting an English-language site based on the English-language reconsideration request.
What you need to know:
- we absolutely do handle reconsideration requests in lots of different languages, including Italian.
- we've also been experimenting with giving more in-depth answers to webmasters. The mismatch between the language of the reconsideration request and the language of the website caused this message to get sent, but
- we'll still send this site more in-depth advice. Based on the website's spammy linkbuilding techniques mentioned in the blog post, it sounds like they could use the extra guidance anyway.
Well played Matt Cutts. Well played.
Kudos for the explanation. After shedding some light on this with your comment the entire situation makes a lot more sense. I'm curious though, after the Googler investigates is this some type of automatic "canned" response that they send?
Aaaaaaaaand case closed.
Thanks for stopping by to clarify, Matt!