Using Stopwords to Boost Search Engine Ranking

Posted on October 3rd, 2008 by admin

Search engine ranking algorithms are more or less complex depending on the search engine in question. Google is, without question, the Daddy of them all. With over 90% of all UK searches going through Google, it makes sense to understand their algorithms best.

So what is a stopword? Put simply, a stopword is a common word in a sentence that adds no additional value to the content or meaning of that sentence. Lets consider an example:

“The Cat Sat On The Mat”

The basic meaning of that phrase can be summed up using the following words:

“Cat, Sat, Mat”

The subject of the sentence is “cat”, the subject’s action is “sat” and the object of the action is “mat”. All the other words in the sentence are stopwords. They add no additional meaning to the sentence and are, in the eyes of Google, of no merit with regards to searches.

Ok, that makes some kind of sense however how can this be used to boost search engine rankings? With regards to our project, it has a big impact in my opinion and here is how:

In running affiliate marketing websites, I update the data in the database from spreadsheets supplid by the retailer. So do the thousand or so other affiliate marketeers who also advertise that retailer’s products!

I am guessing that a good 80-90% of my competitors will do the exact same thing with that data - they will upload it to a database and then call it exactly as it stands from that table into their websites. The net result is that there will be hundreds of identical or near-identical websites vying for attention and rankings in Google. This causes a couple of issues:

1. No one site differentiates itself from its competition.

2. They risk being sandboxed for identical content

So, how to avoid both traps? One method is to remove stopwords from the page title and metakeywords. This has the potential to benefit you in two ways:

1. Your content differs sufficiently from your competitors to reduce the chances of being penalised for identical content.

2. Your search results may also appear more relevant in Googles search algorithms. By removing stopwords like “a” and “the”, your page title may become more keyword rich and show higher in search returns than your competitors.

Like anything in search engine optimisation, this technique is only one in a large number of ever-changing criteria however it is a valuable technique to embrace early on, especially in affiliate marketing where websites tend to have several thousand database driven pages that you cannot possible SEO individually.