Stopwords are a common type of words that search engines generally ignore. Some examples of stopwords include “the”, “is”, “who”, “it”, “on”, and “then”. When people search with these words, search engines focus upon using more meaningful keywords to generate more relevant results.

For example, someone might search for “TV repair in the state of New York”. The search engine would (mostly) ignore “in”, “the”, and “of”, providing results that contain the keywords “TV”, “repair”, “state”, “New”, and “York”. An exception is when the searcher encloses a phrase in quotation marks, but most engines still factor in stopwords to a lesser degree.

So why is this important? Because it can help webmasters determine the best names to give web sites and pages. A title with a lot of stopwords in it will be less effective. Also, business or product names with many stopwords in them can be somewhat harder for searchers to find.

It is less important to emphasize these words in web page text or optimize their keyword density. Some keyword density analyzer software excludes common stopwords. Likewise, webmasters shouldn’t bother putting any stopwords in their META keyword tags, and they ought not be used in the “keywords” field on article or web directories.

Additional stopword examples include “it”, “this”, “that”, “when”, and “be”. Most are under five letters long, with a few exceptions. Specific words vary from one search engine to the next. A few search engines will completely exclude any stopword; for instance, EntireWeb and ExactSeek don’t return any results under “Where Is It?”.

Although the effect of such words remains noteworthy, they aren’t as important as they were some years ago. The search mechanisms employed by major engines have evolved to prevent stopword filters from seriously interfering with the quality of results, so it is now possible to locate websites with names mostly or entirely consisting of stopwords.

One way to find out if words are considered stopwords by Google is to use the suspect words in a search query on Google News. Make sure the query includes at least one non-stopword. If there is at least one stopword, a sentence reading “The following words are very common and were not included in your search… ” will be visible below the search box when results appear.

While the problem of stopwords ought to be taken into consideration, webmasters should also keep in mind that major search engines don’t entirely ignore these words when producing results.

Related posts:

1. 10 Steps to Higher Search Engine Positioning
2. Search Engine Optimization and Flash
3. 4 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

One Response to “Search Engine Stopwords”

1. Shareef Defrawi says:

   October 3, 2009 at 8:13 am

   True, but it is important to note that stop words are necessary to make your copy read well and should not be eliminated altogether – even in page titles, as this is what the engines tend to display on their serps…