When do I use stop words in my URLs?

• What SEO advice do you have for blog-post titles and urls containing stop words?

  For example, if you had a post for a mac and cheese recipe, would it be OK to call it The Best Mac And Cheese with the url being domain.com/mac-and-cheese?

  ... or would you do something like domain.com/mac-cheese to eliminate the stop word, or does it even really matter?

Answer:

Google ignores "stop words" in Titles.

As to URLs, we generally make that decision on a case-by-case basis. For example, we'd keep mac and cheese in the URL since it's short enough and looks better.

In fact removing the and might actually be a negative since people typically DO search for mac and cheese but not-so-much mac cheese. And, Google does produce a somewhat different results page for each of these two searches.

So while the general answer is, they are usually ignored, there are times when they're an inseparable part of a common phrase that people use for search. When that's the case we'll use them if they help make the URL sound right.

It's important to note the Yoast plugin provides a setting that removes these automatically. Use that setting but keep an eye on it for situations like 'mac and cheese'.

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