What are the stop words?
Stop words are commonly used words that are often ignored when indexing webpages by search engines. These terms include ‘a’, ‘at’, ‘for’, ‘is’, ‘of’, ‘on’, and ‘the’. Stop words generally don’t carry much useful information, so search engine algorithms have traditionally disregarded them to save time and resources.
Can you ignore stop words?
However, as search engine technology has become more advanced, stop words may sometimes be valuable for SEO purposes. For instance, when searching for a specific phrase or company name, the individual words in that phrase can be important in determining the most appropriate results. Ignoring stop words could lead to missing out on relevant content. Furthermore, some languages may also require certain stop words to convey meaning correctly.
Overall, while reducing the number of stop words used on web pages where possible is still good practice, they can sometimes be crucial to achieving optimal results from a search engine optimization perspective. As such, it is important not to disregard the value of these ‘common’ terms where appropriate.