These days not much is spoken about filter words. All the search engines have a list of keywords that they have in their database and while crawling, your website search engines will skip these filter words from indexing so as to save some disk space. Words such as a, the, were, where, with, which, and, to, too, be, we, was, in, on, at, top, this, that, it, etc will be skipped or ignored by the search engines. One of the reasons why search engines ignore these words is that they reduce the search speed without enhancing the effectiveness of the searches in any way.
Now the question is how does this affect your SEO or your site’s online performance? One of the factors considered by search engines to rank your site is the keywords that feature in your page title tag, meta keywords, body text and in the hyperlinks. When your optimization does not pay attention to these filter words and allow stuffing of these filter words in the above areas then you will dilute the effect of your SEO. Moreover, we have limitations on the number of characters that are allowed in the page titles and in meta tags so when your title is going to use a number of filter words then you are going to limit your space for the actual keywords for which you would like to get your site listed. So don’t take these filter words for granted in your optimization. It is finer details like these that will set your site apart from the other sites. Moreover, you cannot afford to overlook all these details when your site is competing with thousands of other sites.
There are some filter words that have adverse effect on your website and there have been cases where sites have even been banned from search results by search engines. These types of words that get your site banned are called stop words. Most of these stop words are linked to illegal content and adult content. It is said that when search engines come across stop words, they are programmed to leave your site from being further indexed. Your site will be registered for stop words and when the spiders revisit your website the next time and if there have been updates that have removed those stop words, your site will be crawled further and indexed. If not, your site will be penalized and has to face the ban.
These days search engine algorithms are improved to a great extent they are capable of picking up keyword stuffing. If you are over enthusiastic about supplying your web page with keywords and if you go overboard, you can get your site penalized by the search engines. When you repeat a certain keyword more than required making the content look tailored for search engines rather than for your website’s visitors then you are putting yourself to unnecessary risk. Both low density of keywords and high density of keywords will have their own problems, therefore, maintaining balance is essential in SEO.