How do I find meaningful stopwords for link building in 2026?
Anyone here still using the 2019 stopword continuation methods for link analysis? I'm working with a big batch of outreach prospects and want to filter out useless anchor text. Not sure if the old lists are still solid or if there's a new way to spot the most meaningful stopwords now. Tools or scripts you use?
Asked by tanzeel
1 Answer
Yeah, the old 2019 stopword lists are getting stale, especially since anchor text has shifted with AI spamming and new content trends. Now I usually generate custom stopword lists by scraping your actual anchor text batch, running it through a frequency analysis in Python (look at collections.Counter), then overlaying on top of updated English stopword lists from NLTK or spaCy. For industry-specific stuff, manually check the top 50-100 most common anchors in your set, add any generic words you see, and update your script. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb both let you export anchor text data fast if you need help grabbing samples. This approach surfaces the actual throwaway words in YOUR data instead of relying on someone else's ancient list.