SEO glossary: Stop words

Definition of the term and examples

Stop words are characterized by the fact that they are grammatically obligatory but unimportant for understanding content . In correctly spoken or written language, a question would be formulated as follows: "How do you knot a tie?"

 

It is assumed that a user starts such a search query. The search engine would ignore the stop words when searching for suitable search results, so that the question would be something like: "How to knot a tie?" The pronoun "man" and the indefinite article "eine" would be excluded from the search query due to the irrelevance of the content.

 

This is the central feature of stop words: When speaking and writing a text, they are obligatory because of the grammatical rules, but irrelevant for understanding content.

 

Because the search in databases (e.g. internal database in the company; World Wide Web) should lead efficiently and quickly to the target due to economic aspects, stop words are not processed in search queries. Instead, search engines search documents for terms that are relevant for understanding: "tie" and "knot" from the example are relevant terms.

 

Stop word list with companions, pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions

In technical terminology, a distinction is made between fixed and calculated stop word lists. Unlike calculated stop word lists, fixed stop word lists have no reference to documents, but always refer to the entire language.

 

As the calculated stop word lists are not relevant in search engine optimization (SEO) and this glossary entry, here is just a brief overview: If you examine certain documents to see which words occur most frequently, you will get a calculated stop word list.

 

A fixed stop word list usually contains the words that occur most frequently in a language. The following table contains an overview of German stop words. These are normally ignored by search engines in search queries; two examples of exceptions are given below. First an overview of some stop words:

 

Word type	Examples
Companion	- the - the - the - a - one
Pronouns	- one - me - which - what - Whose
Conjunctions	- and - or - but - as - to
Prepositions	- on - in - on - next to - from

The companions in particular prove to be irrelevant in search queries, as their presence or absence only rarely changes the way the search engine algorithms understand the query.

 

Should one of the rare cases occur in which the companions or other types of stop words are relevant after all, the search engines nowadays register this without any problems. Striking word combinations such as "Die Ärzte" or "The Who" - these are the names of two music bands - are now recognized by search engines and users receive matching results for corresponding search queries.

 

Relevance and use of stop words in search engine optimization

A side fact first: In search engine optimization (SEO for short), stop words are often referred to as "stop words". This is simply due to the widespread use of English words in the entire field of SEO, but in terms of meaning, "stop words" and "stop words" are identical.

 

Stop words are relevant in SEO because a lot has changed in the way Google's search engine handles these words in the last 10 years or so. Some sources cite Google's Hummingbird update from 2013 as the first major semantic incision that changed the way stop words are handled.

 

First of all, for historical context: Google and other search engines always evaluate documents - websites are nothing other than documents - based on the keywords they contain. If the text in the document and other factors optimally match the search query, this document is preferably displayed as a search result.

 

Around 20 years ago, however, the algorithms were only developed to a limited extent, meaning that measures such as keyword stuffing brought webmasters success. In view of the low level of development, it was sufficient for website operators to use keywords on their pages without paying attention to the quality of the content and its grammatical correctness. In this phase, it was even better to avoid stop words in order to achieve the most positive effects on Google rankings. Today, however, the situation has changed:

 

• Google and other search engines can handle stop words very well. The use of stop words in texts therefore does not have a negative impact on the ranking. However, stop words do not boost the ranking either.
• In addition to Hummingbird, the updates from over 10 subsequent years have had a major influence on the fact that naturally written texts are preferred. This even speaks in favor of the use of stop words, as they are a central component of grammar.
• As more and more people are using voice search to formulate complete sentences and start search queries grammatically correctly, search engines are also receiving signals from users that speak in favor of using stop words.

 

Website operators, SEO experts and other online marketing professionals should only be careful to use stop words sparingly in texts with a character limit (e.g. title tag; meta description). Due to the significant influence of the title tag on SEO, for example, it is clearly advisable to use as few stop words as possible and instead use the available character capacity for keywords and/or relevant, meaningful terms.

 

Conclusion: What are stop words?

Stop words are the words of a language (classification: fixed stop words) or a certain number of documents (classification: calculated stop words) that are irrelevant for understanding the content. Search engines always filter out stop words from search queries if they are unimportant in order to determine the search results more efficiently. In the very few exceptional cases in which stop words are relevant to the content, they are taken into account by search engines. Webmasters, SEOs and online marketers in general may use stop words, but should avoid using them in texts with a limited character capacity.