A stop word is a common function word—such as “the,” “of,” “and,” or “is”—that RankGear filters out of certain content analyses because it carries little topical meaning on its own.
| Term | Stop Word |
|---|---|
| Category | Content and Topical Relevance |
| Also known as | Stopword |
| Where it appears | Settings → Word Lists and density formulas |
What it means in RankGear
RankGear keeps an editable stop-word list under Settings → Word Lists, and the density and term-frequency formulas read from it. When you run a content analysis, RankGear strips these words before it counts phrases and measures keyword density, so the numbers reflect the words that actually describe a topic rather than the grammatical glue that holds sentences together. Because the list is comparative rather than absolute, the same words are excluded from your page and from every competitor page in the same run, which keeps the counts on a like-for-like footing.
How to interpret it
Treat the stop-word list as a lens on the density figures, not as an editing rule for your copy. A word being on the list means it was removed from the measurement; it does not mean you should remove it from the page—natural writing needs function words. If a phrase you care about looks under-weighted, check whether part of it is a stop word being filtered before you assume the page is thin on the topic. When a term is genuinely load-bearing for your subject, you can move it off the list so RankGear counts it.
| Word type | Example | Counted? |
|---|---|---|
| Stop word | the, for, with, is | Excluded from density |
| Content word | backlink, canonical, schema | Included in density |
Example
You analyze a page targeting “best running shoes for flat feet.” RankGear filters for as a stop word, so the density report weights “running shoes” and “flat feet” instead of inflating the count with a preposition. If “for” had been counted, the phrase would have looked denser than it really is, and you might have trimmed useful wording chasing a misleading number.
Important considerations
- The stop-word list shapes what the density and term-frequency numbers measure, so two runs with different lists are not directly comparable—note the list you used when you save a report.
- Excluding a word from analysis is not a signal to delete it from your writing; readable copy depends on function words.
- Density figures are comparative indicators drawn from the ranking field, not Google scores. A higher or lower count does not by itself make a page rank better or worse—correlation is not causation.
- Which words count as “stop” is language- and topic-dependent; a word that is filler in one niche can be a key term in another.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.