Title: How does stop words work?
Last modified: August 21, 2016

---

# How does stop words work?

 *  [Marcelo Pedra](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kent-brockman/)
 * (@kent-brockman)
 * [12 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-stop-words-work/)
 * I’m wondering what are the stop words, and if they will filter only upcoming 
   posts and pages. I suppose that previously published content will not be filtered
   by this, even if one decide to edit a very old post. Is this correct?
 * [http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/)

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  [mrppp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mrppp/)
 * (@mrppp)
 * [12 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-stop-words-work/#post-4148137)
 * Looks like it has been updated several times today.
    [http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/changelog/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/changelog/)
 * 1)**I suppose that previously published content will not be filtered by this**
   I have tested it locally and no existing url (slugs) get altered even if you 
   update its contents.
    Some search engines don’t record extremely common words
   in order to save space or to speed up searches. These are known as stop words
   E.G [http://norm.al/2009/04/14/list-of-english-stop-words/](http://norm.al/2009/04/14/list-of-english-stop-words/)
 * so if you had a url somedomain/houses-in-england it would filter it to houses-
   england leaving out IN
    But i have urls with stop words and all get indexed ok
 *  Thread Starter [Marcelo Pedra](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kent-brockman/)
 * (@kent-brockman)
 * [12 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-stop-words-work/#post-4148233)
 * Yes I know. Anyway, the defy for this plugin is to implement the best stop words
   for the most commonly used WordPress locales.
 * BTW, my websites have spanish written content targeted to Latam readers only,
   and I can tell my contents are perfectly indexed WITH the stop words. Maybe this
   is caused due to a badly implemented spanish stop words strategy in Google and
   Bing. Or maybe it is not as important to be filtered out.
 * Also, I can tell from my Analytics, that the keywords used by nearly 40% of my
   traffic are using different combinations of stop words within the keyphrase…
 * In the end, what may be useless to me, may be just great for others. Every website
   and its target audience is a little world… 🙂

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘How does stop words work?’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/wordpress-seo/assets/icon-256x256.gif?rev=3419908)
 * [Yoast SEO - Advanced SEO with real-time guidance and built-in AI](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo/reviews/)

 * 2 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Marcelo Pedra](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kent-brockman/)
 * Last activity: [12 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-stop-words-work/#post-4148233)
 * Status: not resolved