If you work on international sites, Gary Illyes from Google made an interesting comment about filing reconsideration requests – make sure you are filing the request in the same language as your website.

This actually makes a lot of sense.  If  you file a reconsideration request, especially for on-site related issues, if the Googler who is looking at reconsideration requests cannot read the language the site is in, they would be limited on what they can do to approve that request.  But if you file a reconsideration request in the same language as the site, then the Googler who gets it would be able to read both the request and the site.

Gary Illyes later commented that it will take longer to get a reconsideration request processed when in a different language.

This also means that English based SEOs who do penalty related work for non-English sites would not be able to write and file the reconsideration request, but would need someone who can write the language to do so – and this would not be a scenario where I would trust Google Translate to the job!

It also raises an interesting perspective on those sites that have multiple languages… which language would one file in?

So bottom line, if you need to file a reconsideration request with Google for any reason, make sure you do it in the same language as the site.

Updated: Added Gary’s second tweet above.