Google: Page Experience Update Does Not Have A Whitelist List

Google's John Mueller said as far as he knows the page experience update does not have any exception list or whitelist. Meaning, there is not a list of sites where Google says do not apply the page experience update to. John wrote on Twitter "as far as I know, there's no list of exceptions," when asked about it for the page experience update.

This came up when someone asked about some large brand sites having poor web vital scores and having things that are not in accordance with the page experience update, like annoying interstitials. Here are those tweets:

first result for "shootout at OK corral" is https://t.co/w1miVO07Fm which on load does an email interstital, a video interstitial, 2 sticky ads, and a sidebar email interstitial pic.twitter.com/tZtKmYgt5a

— alec (@thealecb) June 28, 2021

Here is where John Mueller said there is no exception list:

Yes. As far as I know, there's no list of exceptions. Some sites are very strong and quite relevant to certain queries, but that doesn't mean this update doesn't affect them the same as others. That includes sites from Google too, FWIW.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 29, 2021

Now, just to be clear, we know this is a light factor, a tie breaker. If you search for ESPN and the site sucks, Google is still going to show you ESPN.

John explained this as well:

Unfortunately it's not that easy, there's always so much happening around search & this is a slower roll-out (which is good for sites that need a bit more time, but of course unfortunate if you want to see a one-time change).

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 29, 2021

Now, Google has talked about whitelists and exception lists before. Google in 2011 first said generally there are not whitelists for algorithms in Google Search but then Google later admitted to having exception lists. One example is SafeSearch where Google can say a site flagged by the adult filter is adult or not adult and thus that would be on a list. Google did also say that there are no whitelists for Panda or Penguin and you'd assume the same would be for core updates.

So there you have it, no exception or whitelists for the page experience update.

Forum discussion at Twitter.