Last week, our SEM team at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company, attended the SMX West conference in San Jose, CA. One of the much anticipated panels included “The Spam Police” featuring Google’s Matt Cutts, Bing’s Sasi Parthasarthy and Blekko’s Rich Skrenta. The panel was moderated by Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan.
One of the interesting topics of the panel was Google and Bing’s take on whitelists & exception lists. They spoke on how some sites might be excepted in their search algorithms using white lists, exception lists, wikipedia lists, etc.
During the panel session, Danny Sullivan pressed Google and Bing regarding this issue. Both search engines admitted to having “exception lists” for sites that may get affected by algorithmic signals. They also claimed that these lists did not improve the sites’ rankings in the SERPs.
According to an official statement by Google sent to Search Engine Land, “Like other search engines (including Microsoft’s Bing), we also use exception lists when specific algorithms inadvertently impact websites, and when we believe an exception list will significantly improve search quality. We don’t keep a master list protecting certain sites from all changes to our algorithms.”
To read more about Google and Bing’s response to having exception lists check out the full transcript of the Spam Police panel or listen to the audio of the panel below.
Be sure to let us know what you think about Google and Bing having exception lists in the comment below.