Understanding Stop Word Rationale

It is important to learn how search engines function to become a SEO expert. One of the fundamentals to how searches are handled by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is the concept of ‘Stop Word'.

Of particular importance to any SEO website handling a PPC search engine marketing campaign, ‘Stop Word' is an umbrella term for all the articles/ prepositions/ words (such as ‘the', ‘a', ‘an', ‘of', and ‘with', etc.) that search engines don't consider in search queries in an attempt to save space and accelerate searches.

Stop words generally do not carry any importance in a search query phrase or their meaning is too general that including it would return unnecessary information in a momentous volume. So, in order to keep the search results most relevant, useful and sane, search algorithms filter stop words and afterwards generate search results.

For example let's review a sentence -

The road to the office is far-flung and difficult when walking in the rain.

In the sentence, ‘the' materializes three times. In order to save space, a search engine possibly will swap it with what's called a marker and the sentence would be restored in the following manner:

* road to* office is far-flung and difficult when walking in * rain.

Thus, the sentence is rationalized by maintaining all of its meaning and saving space to return useful search results.

Citing another example of a search string like -

the football coach

The search engine creates three searches to locate equivalent matches. Foremost, it searches for all the three words, then all equivalents of football, then all corresponding of coach. In all likelihoods just searching for the last two words is sufficient to find appropriate pages. Therefore, the search engine eliminates searching for "the" - a stop word.

Though widely acknowledged by any SEO company in India or outside that there is no definitely defined list of stop words, these broadly include I, a, about, an, are, as, at, be, by, com, de, en, for, from, how, in, is, it, la, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, who, will and with.