Whitelist and Whitelisting

Whitelist or positive list in the information technology referred to a tool that allows people, companies or programs to be listed as being trustworthy. Whitelist, mainly discussed by the common consumers, such as the webmasters with the relation to Internet Protocol address or I.P. address. Often the provider gives the disclaimer that the I.P. they assigned are in Whitelist or in short – Whitelisted I.P. But what is this Whitelisting actually is ?

Basics of Whitelist and Whitelisting

When an organization maintains a whitelist of software for using only the titles on this list are accepted; for example, a school could be in a list of MATLAB and are considered to be trustworthy. Such a list can be used to allow only the software that works correctly. There can be a problem, if the organization’s working software is not considered by the organization as usable.

A spam filter has a white list, it means that e-mails are accepted by the people listed forever. In the same way, for publicly accessible I.P. addresses, there is also a method for whitelisting. You can test and add (if not added and needed) your IP (server and mailserver) from this website :

Other Notes on Whitelist and Whitelisting

Reverse of Whitelisting is definitely is well known – blacklisting. Google search often Ban a website for huge spamming or some other reasons, we call the domain has been blacklisted. On the contrary to believe, all domains listed in Google search are actually whitelisted. Google search, as a private company might have a special exception list for few domains. It is taken that, a I.P. ‘s status as blacklisted has little to do with the domain name in web search, if the IP holds multiple domains and owners are different. Google gets this data easily from the backend, that includes the Google Analytics code sends the required data of the administrator of the domain while editing posts in case of WordPress or the software used to connect to update HTML webpages, another source of data is WHOIS database, which is fully accessible even if Privacy Protection is on. For this reason, Bad Neighbourhood actually does not exist in today’s Google Search to avoid false positivity. Although an unique Whitelisted IP does increases the truth-worthiness of the domain. This effect is can be seen when a domain with contents is moved to a server from well known web hosting company with an unique IP – there will be a clear increase in the crawling to understand about the change. However, in long term, this transient increased rate of crawling actually has very little effect.

Apart from computer, I.P. address, Programs, Web Search etc. Whitelist also exists in various professional fields and practical application in day to day life. In the area of food safety, for example, the whitelist on palm oil explains the palm oil and based products in food to be consumable.