What Are Stop Words?

Date First Published: 28th September 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

When Can Stop Words Cause Issues?
Examples Of Stop Words

Learn more about what stop words are in this article.

Stop words are words that search engines filter out when retrieving results as part of a search query. Stop words are usually articles, prepositions, pronouns, or conjunctions that do not add any meaning to the search query because they are very commonly used and are only used to structure sentences properly. For example, when searching 'How do I install a new computer motherboard', the stop words are 'How', 'Do' 'I', and 'A'. By removing it, 'Install new computer motherboard' the question sounds odd but the meaning of the search query does not overall change. Search engines do not prevent searchers from using stop words, but automatically ignore them when the search results are displayed. Searchers can search for results that include stop words by adding quotation marks to their search query, such as "How do I install a new computer motherboard", which will only return results that contain that phrase.

This does not mean that stop words should be removed from content, titles, or headings as this can make sentences sound odd and create a bad user experience, but the use of them will not influence how high a page ranks in the search results. Even though searchers can still see the stop words, these words are dropped when indexed and ignored when performing a search in order to speed up the crawling and indexing to save storage space.

Note:

Adjectives, nouns, and verbs, such as 'incredible', 'bed', and 'run' are not considered stop words as they are keywords used to add meaning to the search query.

When Can Stop Words Cause Issues?

Stop words can cause issues when searching for phrases that include them, such as in product or company names. For example, ignoring the word 'really' from 'really simple syndication' will return completely different results not relevant to the syndication technology. The same goes with names that include the word 'the', such as 'The Who'. Some search engines may also not remove stop words that are plural or have apostrophes, such as 'can't'.