Stop words are common words that computer programs are often coded to ignore. Examples include: a, the, in, for, at....
We’ve been asked about stop words in URLs a few times. Our thought has always been that putting your whole phrase in the URL is most ideal but we wanted to test it. So, we put this to the test.
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Transcription Below
A stop word in English are a, the, in, for, at, about, around, lots of articles, prepositions, those type of words. They are extremely common and many programming languages ignore them. If you search for something within a programming language, they will ignore stop words because they are essentially not important, they are not the main words. Stop words are often ignored. If you like to see a nice list of English stop words, Yoast has a nice list right there and you can check that out.
Where this comes into play with SEO is let’s say you like the term “best plumber in Dallas”, that is what you want to optimize your page for. You are going after that and this stop word “in”, you like that and you are optimizing for it. What should your URL be? Should it be .com/bestplumberindallas or .com/bestplumberdallas minus the stop word. In my personal opinion and what I have always been thinking is I have always liked stop words, I always liked my full keyword in my url simply because that is what I am going after, the URL is a ranking factor, I should get my full phrase in there especially if that is something that I want. I want this in Dallas concept for what I am going after for this particular phrase so that is what I would put in.
What I decided to do with this one is because we are using English stop words, we need to use English in this test although it would be in absurd phrase. The absurd phrase that we have optimized for is crispy rhino for key and the idea is that the for is the stop word that we are going to be testing. Because we are using English and that creates a lot of variables, what I decided to do was I created the same page on ten different domains. Five of those domains have a URL with the for in it and five have a url without the for. Set 1 has .com/crisy-rhino-for-key and set 2 has .com/crispy-rhino-key, so the stop word is missing. I thought this was a good way to do it and I wasn’t entirely sure how the results would come out but I was thinking that I could do some regression analysis. For you science nerds, you know what that means, for others, regression analysis is the idea where you get a lot of different data points and you could put them in a graph and you can see if a pattern emerges and we have the straight line like this, this is linear regression analysis, this is what is done in real science. We have an advantage in that Google’s algorithm is really a closed system, there is not really anything outside the algorithm, obviously there are a lot of variables within the algorithm but there is not a lot outside of it. In real life, if you were to do a science test, the earth is not a closed system, as a result, when you run a test in the physical world, you have to often do this sort of analysis where you have to plot your results and see if a pattern emerges in.
People are like, how can you do tests on Google’s algorithm, we are actually in a good position because it is a closed system with a certain set of variables, nevertheless, when multiple variables are thrown in, this is what is done. It is regression analysis and this is how you do this and see if a pattern forms and that is how science is done. If anybody asks what we are doing, this is one of the things that we could do. That is what I thought we could do in this particular situation. We will be doing some regression analysis, I’ve got ten different domains and they all go to those pages and there’s the different set of urls, I’ve put them in a chart and we have a nifty line that make for a fun graphic for this right up. Well, that wasn’t needed. When I launched these things and I put them in, notice that, no stop word, no stop word, no stop word, no stop word, stop word, stop word, stop word, stop word and then stop word is down there. So we lost one domain and I do not know where that poor boy went but you can see that the no stop word urls were the definitive winner. We are throwing this in, obviously, there are other results that have happened like hey there is this rhino 3d printer and other things that come up for this particular search but I was pretty surprised to see that the no stop word url pretty much went across the board. This is not something that I’ve implemented into the wild yet, this is just results within the last couple of weeks for what we are seeing but this is how I will be doing my urls moving forward. When I have a long tail phrase that contains stop words, I am going to remove them and I am going to do a url that does not have the stop words in it. This blew my mind that it was so straight down across the board. In order to see all the results, you do have to click for the duplicates but this one right here, the no stop words, was the number one and has always been the number one, once the pages launched. So, that took that one away. This is one of those things that I would not tell anybody about. You might talk to other friends, I am in SIA and they do these tests and here are some fun things that we talk about, you might say that you agree with this or don’t agree with this but I don’t care. On this particular one, I would just put this in your pocket and take it and use it and feel free to not share that with anybody.
Why did this happen like this?
It’s because computer programs ignore stop words and I think that is what is going on. In the situation where it comes to reading the url that I think the stop words are being ignored or that the non stop words version is preferred by search engines.