Question

I saw a WordPress plugin that removes certain words from an articles URL Slug.

So for an example, without the plugin, if I create an article titled…

Organize Your Projects into Boards with the Trello App

then WordPress would automatically create this URL Slug…

organize-your-projects-into-boards-with-the-trello-app

Now if I were to use the Plugin that removes “stop” words, it would instead create this URL slug…

organize-projects-boards-trello-app

Now my question, the plugin’s description says that it is better for SEO, I am curious if others feel this is better to remove words like that or better the have the longer version?

Answer 1

1. ‘stop’ words, are words that Google will make low priority in a search, often ignoring them entirely. Its far more interested in the 5 words in your 3rd example, and rightly so. Can you imagine if it ranked a page higher because of more frequent uses of ‘your’, ‘with’ or ‘the’. Yikes.
2. urls have a max length, so it’s always good to abbrv.
3. Part of the Google algorithm is to do with what we can think of as ‘percentage match’. e.g. If I type ‘organise project boards’ then I will get a 60% match on your third example but a 33% on your second e.g. Google uses similar things in other aspects of its matching, such as the meta keywords.

Hope that helps. Ask if you need more