Stop Words

Stop Words are words that are so common that they have little relevance to the context of a web page. Examples would be adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions. Excluding stop words saves resources on search engines with little effect on the quality of results.

Common stop words include

about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, how

in, is, it, of, or, that, the, this, to, was, what, when

which, who, why, will, with

Searchers can ask search engines to include stop words by using the ‘+’ symbol before the stop word or by putting the entire search phrase in quotes but such searches are the exception rather than the norm. They are often used where the searcher knows an exact phrase from a page. A good example is the start of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be, that is the question”. On a search engine that ignores stop words the results will be very different. Google started indexing stop words in 2005.

Except for these specific cases stop words may be avoided in phrases that target keywords. Examples would be in Anchor Text, Title elements and ALT (alternative) text in image links. This should not be taken to extreme, for example headings should still include stop words where it helps the readability of the content.