tar exclude certain directories but not in subdirectories

I need to transfer a lot of web directories to another machine. The directory structure looks like this:

/var/www/
    site1/
        cgi-bin/ ...
        logs/ ...
        index.html
        images/ ...
        ...
    site2/
        cgi-bin/
        logs/
        ...
    size3/
    ...

To pack the files I'd like to use tar. I need to pack all files, except all "cgi-bin" and all "logs" directories **only** in certain provided paths, not in any subdirectory! These directories should be excluded from packing because they should not appear in the destination and they can be quite large. That slows down the transfer. So I *do not* want to include them and only delete them in the destination. I tried several combinations of this: cd /var/www tar cfz ~/web.tgz site* --exclude-from excludes.list excludes.list is a file that contains lines such as shown here: (the example shows different path styles, I used each of them consistently for the entire file, but no variant worked)

site1/cgi-bin
site1/logs
./site2/cgi-bin
/var/www/site2/logs

The "cgi-bin" directories may occur in other subdirectories (I list them all with a find command), the "logs" directories that I want to exclude are all directly in each "site*x*" directory. Other "logs" directories **must be included**. I could only get to two results: 1. No files were excluded at all 2. All directories that *partially* matched an exclude pattern were excluded, including e.g. /var/www/site2/bla/site1/logs/. This is not acceptable as it's **excluding too much**. Is there a way to make tar exclude exactly the absolute paths provided and nothing else that partially looks like a provided exclude pattern?