Stop List and Keywords

[ChrisMciIlroy]

I've came across a suggested list of words that google will ignore in your content, if this is correct and one of our main keywords is one of those words, will it lose effectiveness?

We are trying to get #1 SERP for "Self Tan" and it seems "Self" is one of the words ignored - so should we just be focusing on Tan?

Any tips / advice would be great!

[KeriMorgret]

I went to that URL listing the stop words in the Internet Archive, and it's had the same content for at least five years now. Years ago, Google did have a notice when it ignored common words, but I don't remember it as being this restrictive even a long time ago. I would consider that list vastly outdated.

Here's some information from Google itself:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861

Words that are commonly used, like 'the,' 'a,' and 'for,' are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search

• [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization -- Google will not ignore the word 'the' in the first query.

[seoug_2005]

Does Google ignores the word an ? A query for "seo" and "an seo" produces different results.

[Theo-NL]

Even though I can see why search engines would find ways around have to deal with these words too much (or attach a lot of value to them) I think the list is either too large, or nonsense altogheter. Prime example would be the inclusion of the word 'plus' on the list. A query for the keywords 'google plus' returns quite different results that a query for 'google'.

[ChrisMciIlroy]

Hi Theo,

Well this could be mis-information which is why I wanted to check but I've come across it in a few places;

http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-stop-words.html

I've only recently got involved with this company and we're work on our link backs (and especially the anchor text!).

Thanks

Chris

[Theo-NL]

Is this a public list? If so, I'd love to have a look.

I don't see why Google would ignore words in the first place, and even more so why they would ignore the word 'self'. In theory I could see why the would ignore words like 'a' or 'the', but not 'self'.What reason does the author of the list state for Google's exclusion of the keywords on it?

As a side note, it is always wise to optimize both incoming anchor text and on-page optimization for closely related variations of words (such as 'self tan' and 'tan' in your case).