"Stop" words: the do make a difference to google!

Paul B · #1 (**permalink**) 12-09-2007, 07:15 AM

For the search phrase 'advice and tips on SEO' my site comes out #2 (Google is #1). This is the page title and H1 tag.

Google tells me, though: "The "AND" operator is unnecessary". But if omit the 'and' I enter 'advice tips on SEO', my site drops to #3.

Further, if I drop the 'on' (what I would consider another stop word), my site drops to #25.

In MSN Live Search my site remains at #11 with all 3 variants.

So:

1) Google does appear to be influenced by 'stop words.

and more importantly:

2) What would normal humans enter in google: 'advice and tips on SEO' or 'advice tips seo'?

hawash · #2 (**permalink**) 12-09-2007, 02:16 PM

you searched for sentence (advice and tips on SEO'_) not separate keywords advice tips SEO

coolguy27 · #3 (**permalink**) 12-09-2007, 08:03 PM

Yes, these are words that Google filter...They just snip the keyword or keyword phrases...

mattk@nexsens.com · #4 (**permalink**) 12-09-2007, 11:53 PM

I would enter a sentence into Google. That is how I search, not by entering random keywords, unless I started with searching for just "SEO" and then was trying to hone in on something. I think most people would do the same.

Paul B · #5 (**permalink**) 12-10-2007, 04:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by coolguy27

Yes, these are words that Google filter...They just snip the keyword or keyword phrases...

But if that is the case my examples should get the same ranking with and without 'stop' words and they don't!

Paul B · #6 (**permalink**) 12-10-2007, 05:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattk@nexsens.com

I would enter a sentence into Google. That is how I search, not by entering random keywords, unless I started with searching for just "SEO" and then was trying to hone in on something. I think most people would do the same.

My feelings too.

Which means if most people use stop words in their search sentences or phrases and Google differentiates between search with and without stop words in them, then including stop words is actually better for ranking in Google - though not MSN search it seems.

coolguy27 · #7 (**permalink**) 12-10-2007, 06:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul B

But if that is the case my examples should get the same ranking with and without 'stop' words and they don't!

Yes..

Quote:

If a word is not relevant to your site, don’t list it in your key words. This is one easy way to avoid losing your index privileges...

You can click this links for more:
SEO :: Drive More Traffic to Your Website With Your Web Page Title!
Expert SEO - Stop-Words
Stop Words

blitzen · #8 (**permalink**) 12-11-2007, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattk@nexsens.com

I would enter a sentence into Google. That is how I search, not by entering random keywords, unless I started with searching for just "SEO" and then was trying to hone in on something. I think most people would do the same.

I'm curious, does anyone know whether more people use sentences or just a string of keywords when they search?

SemAdvance · #9 (**permalink**) 12-11-2007, 04:36 PM

How can you give advice on SEO??? when you do not know how to do keyword research????

LOL

You've made my day......

Here is some free keyword research from a real SEO

Wordtracker

No data for phrase: advice and tips on seo

Overture

No data for phrase: advice and tips on seo

Amazing.........it's almost like a lawyer wanting to know what a defendant and plantiff are....

jtracking · #10 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 03:41 PM

for me it's easy, instead of the and operator i just use in the title and on many parts of my sites the & symbol, I mark it up as & in HTML which helps me to a degree I beleive...

try that out and you may go back to number 1...

jtracking · #11 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blitzen

I'm curious, does anyone know whether more people use sentences or just a string of keywords when they search?

from my research I have found that most of the time it's just keywords but if you have keywords in sentences like "we're a top notch hosting company in burlington ontario" and have "top notch hosting company" as the link text then it helps with your results on hosting company in burlington ontario : )

lindsay39 · #12 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 03:45 PM

Dear SemAdvance:

No need to be nasty!

The question wasn't "Are people searching for my phrase?" but "Does the inclusion or exclusion of words such as AND affect my Google ranking."

You need some lessons in reading! Kind of like a so-called SEO master sticking his/her foot in mouth, wouldn't you say?

LOL!

jackit_chick · #13 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 03:50 PM

Hm, this article I found rings true to me. As a novice google searcher I used to use full sentences when surfing the web. Now I use keywords.

Novice vs. Expert Google Users

SemAdvance · #14 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 03:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lindsay39

Dear SemAdvance:

No need to be nasty!

The question wasn't "Are people searching for my phrase?" but "Does the inclusion or exclusion of words such as AND affect my Google ranking."

You need some lessons in reading! Kind of like a so-called SEO master sticking his/her foot in mouth, wouldn't you say?

LOL!

You are right....while I said it made me smile, and I even laughed you are 150% absolutely positively correct....

I should have let him... go on for the next who knows how long.... not knowing the terms he was targeting were wasting his time....

Dear Paul forgive my trying to shed some light.....next time ask Lindsay as I am sure she will be so kind as to let you go on wasting time....

Most of the many clients over the years who I have told are wasting their time in having been under the wrong assumptions in marketing or who have a website that would hinder their meeting their goals...or whatever.... seem to appreciate the honesty and candor.....

I'll leave you all to your madness....you certainly don't need nasty me here....

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ohh and to answer the question it is not so much the stop words you are using.... it is the fact you are making your keyword term more competitive each time you remove a word.

For example anyone could rank for

Free SEO Help In Timbuktu Michigan - which will give you a very low number of competing pages and the ability to rank at the top easily.

Results 1 - 10 of about 235 for Free SEO Help In Timbuktu Michigan.

Now if we delete the word - Timbuktu

Results 1 - 10 of about 204,000 for Free SEO Help In Michigan

We see a large increase in competing pages... ergo the keyword is much more competitive and likely not to rank as well,

Further if we delete the words in & Michigan - we see the amount of competing pages again increase quite dramatically

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,050,000 for Free SEO Help

Again the ability to rank very highly is therefore much more difficult to accomplish

And if we remove the word Free

Results 1 - 10 of about 32,200,000 for SEO Help

Again we see a very large increase in competing pages.....this would make it almost impossible to rank well.

I hope this helps explain the competitive nature of your keyword term as you remove words.....

In addition if you edit the title tag you would need to edit the other areas of SEO methodology such as density in tags and body content alt image text anchor links etc in order to improve the rankings....

Peace!

martink · #15 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 04:07 PM

SemAdvanced,
Candor is okay; being mean is not. We're all here to help one another out. Most of us try to make our ponits without tearing each other down.

PaulB,
I think you bring up an interesting concept. One I have found to be true too, even though it's not supposed to be. I usually avoid AND, but use other stop words like ON when searching. If I don't find the results I want, I go in and remove the stop words. I don't search using sentences unless I'm searching for something really tricky and am not getting the results I want using keywords. While I hate to admit it, SemAdvance is correct that tools like WordTracker and Overture can help you pin-point which phrases are worth optimizing for (with or without stop words).

DanThies · #16 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 04:17 PM

Word order and proximity do matter in returning search results. Even if you use a "stop word" (a word that is not indexed) in your query, the search engine is aware that you had a word there.

advice and tips on SEO
becomes something like
advice * tips on SEO

If you write "advice and tips on SEO" the search engine knows that there was another word between "advice" and "tips" because the position of each word in the document is stored in the index.

If everyone writes naturally, then we can all search naturally, and nobody has to think about stop words.

Google's warnings on the use of and/or are a bit annoying, and confusing for a lot of searchers who would never have thought to use boolean operators in their search.

jonathannelson · #17 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 04:19 PM

a webmasterworld newsletter finally prompted me to signup as a member

and for this i must thank you!

now to the matter at hand....

A couple different things to keep in mind:

a. lsi or latent semantic indexing understanding (recommend Google Semantically Related Words & Latent Semantic Indexing Technology : SEO Book.com)
b. word proximity in relation to keywords being targeted
- Currently there is no usage of this key phrase for the page that is ranking in google. short term solution: revert to some older proven SEO tactics. recommendation: use advice "advice and tips on SEO" and "advice & tips on SEO and "advice tips on SEO" somewhere on the page. recommendation: use the last two kw phrases in the meta kw tag because their just derivatives of your main phrase. experiment with these and test them out for a few weeks.
c. stop words. stop words are just google's way of identifying the context of your search query. the reality is that more and more people are using longer more descriptive sentences. this is simply the evolution of persons relationship/trust with a search engine and is expected. remember we use to say keyword then it was key-phrase and then it was long tail and now it is sentence

d. long term recommendation. if your site is deemed an authority on all things SEO by google...you will no longer need to focus on the minutia of the above tactics or relentless testing. need proof? for the same google search query (advice and tips on SEO - Google Search), a popular or "authoritative" site on SEO comes up #2. It send you to this page: High Rankings® Advisor Newsletter: Search Engine Marketing Tips and SEO Advice Where is this person using that specific key phrase on the page? No where. And this is exactly the point of a Google authoritative website...to rank for 'like kw,phrases, sentences'. So you should be thinking holistic long term SEO strategy, instead of the small miniscule things, such as stop words.

i'm not trying come off as the all knowing with my response because really... only the google scientists know 100% whats best. i just hope my response sheds some light on some things and helps you sir.

jackit_chick · #18 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 04:20 PM

SemAdvance

I'm sure what everyone is trying to say is your advice, reputation and obvious vast experience in SEO is very much appreciated, but we implore you to use the same professionalism that you use in your work, in the way you help and advise others.

Anyway, let us all put snip snappyness behind us and carry forth w/ the help and advice!

I agree with SemAdvance that the more broad keywords you aim for the lower your page rank will become just because of it's broadness. For example, if I were to take a sentence right off one of my webpages, of course it would show up number one, but two or three words? highly doubtful. This is where building links and advertising and all that other marketing stuff comes into play, you can only do so much with keywords.

CyberCrone · #19 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 05:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SemAdvance

You are right....while I said it made me smile, and I even laughed you are 150% absolutely positively correct....

I should have let him... go on for the next who knows how long.... not knowing the terms he was targeting were wasting his time....

Dear Paul forgive my trying to shed some light.....next time ask Lindsay as I am sure she will be so kind as to let you go on wasting time....

Most of the many clients over the years who I have told are wasting their time in having been under the wrong assumptions in marketing or who have a website that would hinder their meeting their goals...or whatever.... seem to appreciate the honesty and candor.....

I'll leave you all to your madness....you certainly don't need nasty me here....

Peace!

To SemAdvance...You are right. We certainly don't need nasty you here. Go get some sensitivty, bro. This is a community, all related by our interest in learning more about what we do, and not a field for taking ill will out on each other. The net effect of your attitude is that I won't bother to read any more postings by you, and I'm sure others will react the same. So what does your attitude get you? If it's a feeling of superiority and contempt for lesser mortals, then enjoy! But if it's communication and a sense of community you want, you're out of luck.

Toni

pemburung · #20 (**permalink**) 12-12-2007, 05:47 PM

Amazing how different people read different things into the same words. It seems pretty clear to me: Google says the "and" (and maybe the "on") are not necessary and won't make any difference. But when you search on "advice tips SEO" you get one set of results, and when you search on "advice and tips on SEO" you get a different set. And yes, that's without putting the sentence in parentheses so it is seached as a whole. So, empirically, adding or removing the stop words does make a difference to the results, contrary to what Google says. Paul is correct.

Semadvance, he did not say take out significant search terms, such as Michigan, he said take out stop words only. Of course you'll get different results if you take out prime terms.

While I have nowhere near the ability or experience of Semadvance, I also wouldn't be taking Wordtracker and Overture as the oracle of phrases. They by & large don't like any phrase over 4 words, and right now if you search on "advice on SEO" on wordtracker there are no results, but 17.9 per day on overture. Stake your marketing and company's future on that sort of result? No thanks.

All this has nothing to do with whether the phrase advice and tips on seo is a good target phrase, but I don't see anywhere in the thread that Paul suggested it was. He did suggest that if you are targeting a phrase then the stop words do make a difference, and he wondered how most people searched.

Google returns 177,000 pages for "advice tips on SEO", and 210,000 for "advice and tips on SEO". Would seem to me that Google sees a difference between the two ways to enter that particular search. The person who took Google's own advice would have come up with 33,000 fewer options for their search - in other words, dropping the operator "and" lost about 16% of the results. And the first page has changed, which is most important. Maybe it got rid of some of those phrases such as ...."and fruit cake advice, tips on seo, and car repair." Or whatever. Seems a good thing to me.

Seems to me that no matter how you cut it, Paul is right. I'm sure he'll accept apologies sent on a nice bottle of anejo rum in time for Xmas.