Stop words on Google

[eCommando]

How does Google treat stop words such as "on", "Free", etc?
Would you put the word FREE in the title & meta tags?
Will Google just ignore them?

[sunny]

If FREE is something that can attract your vistors by putting in title, then I would go right ahead. Google does count FREE as a keywords. Examples: Keyword: "Free Casino Bonus" etc.

Not quite sure about "on" because that doesn't come much in keywords. You will see if you search for something like "history on casinos", then google gives a reply saying

"on" is a very common word and was not included in your search"

But when you search for "history casinos" then it gives completely different results than the keyword "history on casinos". It should give the same results becuse when i search for "history on casinos" then it says "on" was not included in your search.....

So not quite sure about "on"

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=sunny]"on" is a very common word and was not included in your search"

But when you search for "history casinos" then it gives completely different results than the keyword "history on casinos". It should give the same results becuse when i search for "history on casinos" then it says "on" was not included in your search.....[/QUOTE]
Well 'on' is not included in the search but is use to rank. It does not use 'on' as a selection criteria of pages, but once the pages are nominated, then an exact match of "history on casinos" will rank better obviously.

An other example. If you have the google toolbar type in :

poker game download

Look on the right for the searched words. You have 2 list of nominated documents. POKER GAME and DOWNLOAD are underlined... not the 3 words separated. So searches are not always what we think... Sauce for toughts.

[disgust]

usually they're not even included

when you search for something with words like "to" or "on" etc in them, it excludes them right away (and tells you so)

[Jay]

Most of the times all this "words" are overlooked by Google, what I try to do is think more like a user and less like an SEO, for example, you are looking for history of casinos, people is more likely to use "casinos history", this way you can overtake both ways, "history of casinos" and "casinos history". Whichever way they looked for those 2 keywords, you''ll be on it, without adding extra text to your page, which in term reduces your overall keyword density. Now, if its relevant for the page, as was mentioned before, you are offering "free" stuff, and this is what the surfer is looking for, it will be taken in consideration. Its different to look for "gambling" than for "free gambling" or "Gambling for fun". I guess its pretty relative to your page's target and content.