What are Stop Words and its imapct on SEO


Stop words are the most common words in a language. These extremely common words can be excluded from a sentence without changing the meaning of that sentence. Stop words are cleared out before or after processing of natural language data or text in normal computing routine.


In SEO terminology these are the most common words that most search engines avoids to save space and time in processing large data during crawling or indexing. This helps search engines to save space in their databases.

Google Hummingbird and Stop Words

Hummingbird is a significant change in Google algorithm in 2013. Hummingbird impacts highly on natural language queries especially when it comes to context and meaning over individual keywords. 
It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a site with enhanced ability to provide search results containing most appropriate page rather than a homepage.

The update marked the big change to Google search in years with more user-friendly search interactions. Thus publishers and writers were encouraged to optimize their websites with natural writing rather than forced keywords and keyword stuffing.

How Stop Words can affect SEO

Stop words can hurt your SEO performance especially if used frequently in the title of a site. Also when it comes to effective use of space for metatags stop words can waste space.

Avoid the use of stops words in the following:

  • ·        Page title tags
  • ·        Web page URLs
  • ·        Meta descriptions
  • ·        Image Alt text
  • ·      Keywords
Read more here.

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