Google’s John Mueller answered a question about whether you should use stop words in URLs.
Mueller not only answered the question, but also explained the impact of words in URLs and recommended ways to approach words used in URLs.
Stopword Background in Search
Stop words are common words such as ‘a’, ‘and’, and ‘the’.
In the early days of search, these kinds of words weren’t considered important to search engines, and therefore weren’t considered important to SEO.
If you recall, in the early 2000s, stop words didn’t matter because search engines didn’t really understand what the page was about. They worked by identifying which keywords the page was related to, and stop words were generally ignored.
Bill Slawski alluded to the lack of importance of stop words in his 2008 article, The New Google Approach to Indexing and Stop Words.
“Not long ago, when I typed the phrase ‘room with a view’ in Google (without the quotes), I was warned that my query contained a ‘stop word’.
Searching for ‘room with a view’ may return results such as ‘room with a view’, ‘room with a view’, or phrases that replace the stop word with another word . So when you search for phrases with stopwords, you’re less likely to find exactly what you’re looking for. ”
Later that year, Bill wrote another patent discussing meaningful stopwords. This can be seen as a tipping point in how Google handles stopwords in search queries and his web page content.
In his article, he discussed a patent that determines whether stop words are meaningful.
As a result, stop words such as “a” and “the” were sometimes seen as important to the meaning of the keyword phrase, but this patent, like previous patents Bill explained, is a great way to improve content and search. It was limited to stop words in queries.
The patent didn’t even care about stop words in URLs.
So, if the URL contains stop words, do they matter?
Stop words in URLs
John Mueller paraphrased this question as follows:
“In short, if I use the words from the page title in the URL, should I also include the stopper words?
For example, should the page be called Why-is-the-sky-blue.html or Why-sky-blue.html?”
Mueller replied:
“Words in URLs play very little role in Google Search.
I advise you not to overthink it.
Use long-lived URLs, don’t change them often, and make them convenient for your users.
Whether you use numeric IDs with or without stop words is entirely up to you. ”
Minimal importance of stopwords in URLs
Mueller said he minimized the importance of the words in the URL to Google and said it doesn’t matter if you use numeric IDs in the URL.
Numeric IDs are URL filenames without words, such as /article-id-12345.
That answer is similar to the Google Office Hours Hangouts answer he gave back in 2016 (see at the 17:57 minute mark).
Mr Mueller said:
“I think it’s a very small ranking factor, so it’s not something I really try to enforce.
And it’s not even worth the effort to rebuild your site just to include your keywords in your URLs. ”
Six years later, Mueller didn’t even say whether words in URLs were a ranking factor, only stating that they “played a minor role in Google search.”
Coming back to using stop words in your URLs, Mueller said make your URLs user-friendly, which is good advice.
Google doesn’t show URLs in search results, so it doesn’t matter (in terms of CTR) whether the URL contains stop words or not.
In a context where a potential site visitor can see the URL, URLs with stop words that add meaningful context look more natural and, as a result, more confident than URLs without those stop words. and higher click-through rates.
Google’s own documentation on URLs lists some rules to follow as best practices.
- “When possible, use easy-to-read words in URLs instead of long ID numbers.
- Localized words in the URL (if applicable).
- Use UTF-8 encoding where necessary. ”
Google also says that using hyphens helps search engines understand concepts. something to think about.
“Consider using hyphens to separate words in URLs. This makes it easier for users and search engines to identify concepts in URLs. Underscores (_) are We recommend that you use a hyphen (-) instead.”
The guidelines also list things you shouldn’t do.
- Deprecated: Using non-ASCII characters in URLs
- Deprecated: Unreadable long ID numbers in URLs:
https://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1- Deprecated: Keywords in the URL are combined:
https://www.example.com/greendress
That Google Search Central page has many other recommendations and warnings about URLs, but nothing about stop words.
That’s probably not an oversight, but an indication that it could be a trivial consideration in a larger scheme.
Ultimately, as John Mueller said, “It’s entirely up to you.”
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Watch John Mueller answer the question at the 7:50 minute mark.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro
