Should stop words such as "and" and "in" be omitted from URLs for SEO?

The use of 'stop' words have never worked negatively unless it was considered excessive word spam... in the late 90's they were treated as noise and to some degree ignored. Thankfully times have changed and Google looks at common words completely different than it did almost 2 decades ago. I highly recommend SEO guides written in the past 2 years.

URL's should be kept short but not at the expense of users not understanding the content before clicking... For example if you had a page about the movie 'The Game' it would be better to use /the-game/ rather than /game/.

Let's pretend for a moment that you went out on Saturday night to a bar called Hacker Bar, this should look something like this:

• /night-out-at-hacker-bar-september-2017/ GOOD
• /hacker-bar-images-september-2017/ GOOD
• /hacker-bar-september-2017/ GOOD
• /hacker-bar-images/ GOOD
• /pictures-of-me-having-a-night-out-at-hacker-bar-back-in-september-2017/ POINTLESS

The point I'm trying to make, is there's no secret formula to making a good URL, a good url is what tells users the information they need to know before clicking, its also a very highly subjective topic.

Consider URL's as a short summary, the title and meta description is where you fill in the blanks and tell users the full description.

There is a book called, "In and Out of Africa". If Amazon used URIs the way you are questioning, the URI would be `https://amazon.com/Africa". How would that be helpful in searching for this one book?

Does that answer the question? Does this make you question your source?

It seems like modern search algorithms make good use of conjunctions and prepositions so it doesn't seem worth sacrificing human readability by omitting such words for search engines' sake.

A problem arises when you don't have enough other words to put in there. I would like to add to Rob's "In and Out of Africa" example one of my own. A few years ago I spent a month searching for a way to download a movie called "+1". At the time it seemed invisible to the relevant search engines. Some still can't see it clearly. Presenting that movie online as "+1" instead of, for example, "Plus One" was obviously a poor judgement.