Can Experts Exchange be excluded from search results?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Here’s a fun question from Joshua Starr in Indianapolis, Indiana. Joshua asks, “Is it possible to exclude Experts Exchange from search results? Why are they ranked so high, with such a spammy interface?” Okay, well, there are a lot of different nuances to the answer of this question. We are not going to remove Experts Exchange because they don’t violate our quality guidelines or at least they currently don’t and that they don’t cloak. Some people think that they do cloak, but if you’re going to look at the cache page, you know, you try to get an answer and you click on the cache page, and you go down to the very bottom, the content is there. So, it’s not as if they’re showing different content to Googlebot than they are to users. If they did, that would be a valid reason for removing Experts Exchange or any other site. However, if you use Search Wiki, you can remove Experts Exchange from individual queries. And it’s not just for that one query. We’ll often remove it for related queries. So, if you really don’t like a particular URL on Experts Exchange or even the site, you can sort of click to remove that, do a search for them and remove and all that sort of stuff in Search Wiki, and we’ll try to learn over time that you don’t like at Experts Exchange. So, you know, why are they ranked so high? Why don’t you take action? They look spammy. If they’re not violating our quality guidelines, just because someone does or doesn’t like a website is not a good enough reason to try to take somebody out. We try to maintain that quote by Voltaire. You know, “I may not like what you say but I’ll defend to the death your ability to say it.” So just because something–someone says something objectionable to us doesn’t mean that we’ll remove it from our index. So, whether you think it is spammy or not is up to you. And you can use Search Wiki. But if doesn’t violate our quality guidelines, we try to be very careful about that. You don’t just remove a site because you don’t like it, for example. There has to be an actual violation of our quality guidelines or, you know, some sort of legal removal or something like that, like a virus or Malware, Trojan, those sorts of things. So you can still do it for yourself but unless something changes, I don’t expect this to remove it from our search results.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: