What are Stop Words for Google

Google and other big search engines ignore common words for example ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘where’, in addition to certain single digits and single letters. These words are called “filter words” or “stop words”. They’re ignored because they tend to slow down a search without improving the results.

Of course, every search engine has its own list of filter words. We’ve found out that the following words seem to be ignored by most search engines:

a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with

Stop words and Google :

• Use your most important keywords at the beginning of the title, meta tags, link texts and body text.
• Avoid using filter words to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.
• Make sure that your web pages have the right keyword density and don’t contain stop words.

While filter words might dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords, some words might get your web page banned on search engines. These words are called stop words.

Adult words and phrases that contain sexual content are the most common stop words. However, some search engines build custom stop word lists to penalize web sites that use “keyword stuffing”. Some sites use the same keyword over and over on their pages to get a high rank for that keyword on search engines, even if it is not related to their content.

Of course, search engines try to find those sites and they penalize web pages that use keyword stuffing. Unfortunately, some sites are penalized although their webmasters didn’t try to spam the search engines just because they use a keyword too many times.

That’s why keyword analysis and the right keyword density is very important for a successful web site. If the keyword density is too low, you won’t get a good ranking, if it’s too high, your site might get accused of keyword stuffing.

This is all about the filtering of stop words from Google eye, please do drop your comments and suggestions in the below section. If you have any questions, please leave us at our webmaster forum.

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Tags: Google, Online Marketing, seo

Category: SEO Tips