Some words are considered to be stop words because they aren’t very informative. Means doesn’t add any value to context.
In other words, they are not going to change the meaning of the content. In many cases they are just prepositions, conjunctions, or pronouns.
“A common practice when performing text mining is to remove common words, which are called stop words. The most common items to be removed are stop words in the English language, also sometimes referred to as noise words.”
Stop words are always used by copywriters just to structure sentences in the proper way.
These are some stop words: “the, of, and”.
Stop words are also sometimes called “noise words” or “insignificant words”.
Take an example below
- Hotels in dubai
- Hotels Dubai
In the above two cases, “in” is considered a stop-word that won’t bring any special value to context.
Even after removing ‘in’ SEO results are going to be the same.
Wait! Here is the biggest hack, if you are really confused about using stop words in your copy.
Just google your keywords (query) with and without stop-words. If you find same result in SERP, then no use of stop-word. Just remove it.
Stop- Words Role in SEO
Many search engines don’t store the stop words because they’re not very useful.
Also Search Engines look to eliminate stop words from the search results because they tend to occur frequently and don’t usually help with finding content.
STOP words are usually excluded from indexing, making them invisible for queries that reference them. This is done as part of building the document’s index (not at query time, so it won’t hinder queries that refer to stop words). That way, queries that refer to stop words won’t match any documents, reducing the chance of unnecessary wading.
A stop word is a word that is not very informative in the sentence. All words that are not relevant to the topic of the text should be removed from it, and one way of doing this is by removing stop words.
Impact of Stop-Words on Google SERP
The importance of stop words in SEO can be seen in Google’s indexed web pages, where the page length is calculated by counting words. The calculation includes stop words, but not their repetitions.
Google doesn’t store stopwords for its indexing to reduce the size of the index.
Search engines like Google may ignore Stop Words both in search queries and search results.
And the reason behind this is pretty simple. Stop-Words have nothing to do with the context of content, even after removing them the meaning of content is unchanged.
Remember, I have used Stop-words in this post too. So it’s never recommended to remove all Stop-words. They improve the readability score of your content, only just taking care of frequent repetition of stop words.
Though Stop words are not directly changing the context, sometimes they greatly contribute to understanding the context of content.
What’s the take on using stop words? Conclusion?
By now, you have clearly understood what Stop words are and their impact on SEO.
Now answering question in your mind, I know for that reason you are here and reading posts.
So final takeaway on using Stop Words in content –
In my honest opinion, you actually no need to worry about ‘Stop Words’. This is nothing new to CMS, Webmaster and even Search Engines. And they already have figured out how to deal with it.
All you have to take care of is repetitions of Stop Words in your copy, also keep eye on readability score.
Simply you can focus on generating great content and SEO tools/ WP plugins will assist you on using or removing stop words as per necessity.
Just for your reference here is a list of stop-words
