I have read before, it's recommended to don't use And, In and The in the URL, because this is will effect on the site rank.
Is it correct? if yes please guide me with the list of words that should be not used in the URL.
asked Sep 17, 2017 at 9:48
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2Can you link to the places that you have read this? I've never heard this advice before.– Stephen Ostermiller ♦Sep 17, 2017 at 11:00
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@StephenOstermiller, Kindly Check this moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls, Specifically at point 8 Including stop words isn't necessary– Mohamed El-Qassas MVPSep 17, 2017 at 13:29
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1@StephenOstermiller theres a post by Joost De Valk (from Yoast SEO) that talks about this - yoast.com/ask-yoast-stop-words-in-your-focus-keyword– Prasad AjinkyaSep 17, 2017 at 16:41
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3In the era of semantic search there is no such thanking as a stop word. That whole notion is a ridiculous left over from an era before Google. Google in the early days did not index terms that lent no immediate value, however well before 2005 it was clear the so-called stop words have value in semantic analysis. So toss this silly concept and write stuff that makes sense to people please. Cheers!!– closetnocSep 17, 2017 at 17:31
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3 Answers
The use of 'stop' words have never worked negatively unless it was considered excessive word spam... in the late 90's they were treated as noise and to some degree ignored. Thankfully times have changed and Google looks at common words completely different than it did almost 2 decades ago. I highly recommend SEO guides written in the past 2 years.
URL's should be kept short but not at the expense of users not understanding the content before clicking... For example if you had a page about the movie 'The Game' it would be better to use /the-game/ rather than /game/.
Let's pretend for a moment that you went out on Saturday night to a bar called Hacker Bar, this should look something like this:
/night-out-at-hacker-bar-september-2017/GOOD/hacker-bar-images-september-2017/GOOD/hacker-bar-september-2017/GOOD/hacker-bar-images/GOOD/pictures-of-me-having-a-night-out-at-hacker-bar-back-in-september-2017/POINTLESS
The point I'm trying to make, is there's no secret formula to making a good URL, a good url is what tells users the information they need to know before clicking, its also a very highly subjective topic.
Consider URL's as a short summary, the title and meta description is where you fill in the blanks and tell users the full description.
answered Sep 17, 2017 at 12:38
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1I would use
the-hacker-barhere, to emphasize that its the name of the bar, not some bar that might or might not frequently be visited by hackers. But this only shows that URLs are highly subjective and what is "right" is hard to see sometimes. Sep 17, 2017 at 22:23
There is a book called, "In and Out of Africa". If Amazon used URIs the way you are questioning, the URI would be `https://amazon.com/Africa". How would that be helpful in searching for this one book?
Does that answer the question? Does this make you question your source?
It seems like modern search algorithms make good use of conjunctions and prepositions so it doesn't seem worth sacrificing human readability by omitting such words for search engines' sake.
A problem arises when you don't have enough other words to put in there. I would like to add to Rob's "In and Out of Africa" example one of my own. A few years ago I spent a month searching for a way to download a movie called "+1". At the time it seemed invisible to the relevant search engines. Some still can't see it clearly. Presenting that movie online as "+1" instead of, for example, "Plus One" was obviously a poor judgement.
