Google Stop Words 2024: What Are The Stop Words In SEO?

Here is a comprehensive guide to stopping words used in SEO, also known as Google stop words.

You’ll learn how to identify stop words and when they should be removed from your writing in this new guide.

Since I’ve worked in SEO for almost a decade, I’ve used the exact same logic. An SEO stop word guide for practical use.

No matter whether you are a technical SEO expert or a complete beginner, you’ll find this guide easy to follow.

Let’s get going!

1. What Are SEO Stop Words?

Stop words are commonly ignored by search engines and are part of their algorithm.

Here are some examples:

  • the
  • an
  • a
  • of
  • or
  • many

The statistics show that stop words account for about 25% of the content of a blog post, even if they have nothing to do with it.

SEO stop words are often ignored by search engines, in both search queries and results.

Google Stop Words

It is likely that you have heard of the term “stop words” if you use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Those words that have been filtered out as stop words are words without meaning.

Stop words on Google usually include articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns. Search engines don’t care about stop words, since they don’t affect the results displayed.

2. Does SEO Suffer From Stop Words?

Depending on the situation.

Google views stop words as a way to expedite the process of crawling and indexing the web pages that it knows are available.

Thus, by avoiding “empty” words, Google saves time and saves databases space. Say someone searches for: “carpenter in New Jersey”

In this case, the word “in” does not affect the meaning of the remaining terms, so Google would not provide them and provide results for “carpenter New Jersey”.

It’s not uncommon for users to use longer phrases like: “an adoption shelter for dogs in Boston”.

Rather than showing “dog adoption shelter Madrid” search results, Google displays “dog adoption shelter Madrid” search results.

The results are still the same with minimal or no differences, but Google doesn’t have to put in as much work as before to generate them.

3. How Do Search Engine Rankings Affect Stop Words In SEO?

SEO stop words can have an impact on rankings, but they aren’t a major ranking factor in and of themselves.

In this game, stop words are an essential part of improving Google’s algorithms in order to better match search intent.

I have a good tip for you:

Theoretical SEO shouldn’t trump readability

Content is king when it comes to SEO. Consistently.

This is the title of another post that has been popular in this blog: “SEO Writing in 2020: How to Write SEO-friendly Blog Posts.”

Could we remove the stop words to make it read better? We should remove the stop words to make it read better: “SEO Writing 2020: How to Write SEO-friendly Blog Posts”

Even though it makes sense, to me it sounds a bit fishy… it’s almost like spun content!

As a ranking factor and your page’s potential first impression, your page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor.

The following is another good tip:

Synonyms and semantics are taken into account by Google’s algorithms.

Semantically, Google does not yet understand everything, but it gets better every day.

In order to optimize both readability and technical SEO, it’s best to remove every stop word like a terminator.

Here’s how you can look at it:

If someone looped together incoherent English fragments to remove stop words, would you click the results? I doubt it.

4. When should SEO Stop Words Be Removed?

Take a moment to consider:

Search engines don’t value SEO stop words. These characters eat up valuable space in key places like the URL or the page title. Do you know what to do?

Title (meta-title) of The Page

Titles of web pages should not exceed 55 to 60 characters, including spaces, as search engines read them.

In titles, should stop words be included?

meta-title

I think they should not be removed, even though this is an old debate. Search engines do not find meaning in them, but users do. We write for people, not for search engines.

In The URL

SEO-friendly URLs are important.

URLs are a ranking factor according to Neil Patel.

In more detail:

  • According to Google, URL length is ranked #46 out of 200 ranking factors
  • Path #47 is listed for the URL
  • There is a keyword #51 in the URL
  • There are 52 characters in the URL string

The URL, however, is barely noticed. To shorten a URL, it is recommended to remove SEO stop words. There are a maximum of 70 characters in a URL that can be displayed. As a rule, it is not good to edit URLs so that they are hard to read or understand.

As an example, this post’s primary keyword is “SEO stop words”

URL

The title is: “SEO Stop Words: The Definitive Guide”

Make the URL something like this: https://bloggersideas.com/blog/seo-stop-words-the-definitive-guide

As follows: https://bloggersideas.com/blog/seo-stop-words

So, the second URL is easy to remember, it contains my exact keyword, and it doesn’t contain any stop words.

Finally, do not eliminate stop words unless their absence would lead to a poor user experience. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Google and other search engines to distinguish empty words from useful terms. As a best practice, it is advisable to remove unnecessary words from the URL.

5. When Do Stop Words Count In SEO?

Stop words can sometimes alter the meaning of phrases or sentences.

In this case, Google’s algorithm is smart enough to take them into consideration, taking the words along with the main keyword into account when interpreting the search query.

6. Stop words According To The Experts

When writing for SEO, most experts recommend removing SEO stop words from URLs.

This affirmation is followed even by the popular Yoast plugin. Google stop words might have an unwanted effect on rankings, as well as increasing the URL’s length and making it more difficult to remember.

Does Google’s decision to stop words hurt SEO?

There is some truth to that, but not all. Good search engines want to enhance the user’s experience, and filtering out stop words would ruin that in a large percentage of cases.

Grammarly’s correct sentences must contain stop words to enhance their meaning.

These days, search engines discourage the idea that Google stop words are completely bad when in fact, avoiding them completely would be unnatural and unhelpful.

Quick Links:

Conclusion: Google Stop Words 2024

The use of excessive stop words hurts SEO, not the words themselves.

It might be a good idea to use general words and keywords as much as possible for any site, avoiding stop words when possible and only when necessary, because that may be considered a best practice by Google in terms of SEO.

Andy Thompson
This author is verified on BloggersIdeas.com

Andy Thompson has been a freelance writer for a long while. She is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Digiexe, a digital marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. She has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing & affiliate marketing too. She likes sharing her knowledge in a wide range of domains ranging from e-commerce, startups, social media marketing, making money online, affiliate marketing to human capital management, and much more. She has been writing for several authoritative SEO, Make Money Online & digital marketing blogs like ImageStation.

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