Browse the product catalog of almost any fashion or jewelry store and you keep running into the same words: elegant, stylish, luxury, beautiful, gorgeous. They sound appealing, but in practice they do exactly the opposite of what a good product title should do. In this article we explain why these filler words hurt, and how automatic filtering and deduplication solve this structurally — with concrete numbers from a real-world case.
The problem with subjective adjectives
Words like "elegant" and "stylish" are subjective and generic. They say nothing specific about the product, and virtually any product in the catalog could just as easily be described with them. That leads to three concrete problems:
- Duplicate titles: when dozens of products all start with "Elegant gold..." titles emerge that are barely distinguishable from each other, which search engines interpret as low-differentiation content.
- No search volume: virtually no one searches Google for "elegant bracelet" — people search on concrete characteristics like material, stone type, or style name. The word "elegant" adds no search value at all, while taking up valuable character space in the title.
- Poor CTR: in search results, a title with "elegant" or "stylish" doesn't compete on specificity. A title that actually names the concrete material or feature aligns better with search intent and scores a higher click-through rate.
Why these words show up everywhere anyway
Filler words creep into the catalog through supplier feeds, translated product descriptions, and copywriters who tend to make products sound more appealing by adding adjectives. The problem is that these words are easily overlooked during manual review — they don't sound wrong, they sound positive. It's only when you line up titles side by side that it becomes clear how often the same words repeat without adding distinguishing value.
Automatic filtering of filler words
When generating and optimizing product titles, pshly.ai automatically filters out a fixed list of known filler words that add no search value, including terms like elegant, stylish, luxury, gorgeous, and similar generic adjectives. Instead, character space in the title is reserved for concrete, distinguishing characteristics: material, color, size, style, or use case. The result is a title that's more specific and therefore aligns better with how people actually search.
Deduplication of repeated words
Besides filtering filler words, the system also solves a more subtle problem: word repetition within the same title. This often happens when an original title and an added description overlap, for example "Gold Gold Ring with Pearl" after an automatic field merge. The dedupe logic recognizes and removes these repetitions, so the final title stays clean and readable without unintended duplicate words.
Real-world case: G&F Verpakkingen
At G&F Verpakkingen, many product titles were full of filler words and unintended repetitions that had accumulated over time through multiple rounds of manual editing and supplier imports. In the first enrichment round, 214 titles were cleaned up: filler words like elegant and stylish were removed and replaced with concrete product characteristics. A second round, focused on titles that had narrowly missed the initial criteria or whose source data had since been updated, produced another 33 cleaned-up titles. In total, 247 titles were structurally improved across two enrichment rounds, without any manual review needed.
What a good title does contain
A strong product title after cleanup typically contains:
- The product type, clear and recognizable.
- The material or main raw material.
- A distinguishing feature such as stone type, color, or shape.
- The collection name, if it has search value.
For example: instead of "Elegant Stylish Gold Ring" it becomes "Gold Ring with Round Pearl — Minimalist Collection". The second version is more specific, contains no filler words, and aligns better with searches from people actually looking for this type of product.
Effect on CTR and recognizability
Besides the SEO effect, cleaning up filler words also has a direct impact on how a catalog looks in a product overview. When dozens of titles no longer start with the same generic adjective, it becomes easier for customers to quickly distinguish between products while scrolling through a collection page — which increases the chance of a click to the right product.
How to apply this to your own catalog
Start with a sample: go through twenty random product titles and count how often generic adjectives appear without a concrete addition. If that's the case for a substantial share, a bulk round of title optimization is likely the fastest way to improve both SEO and readability. Learn more about how titles and full product descriptions are generated on the page about product descriptions.
Measuring whether the cleanup works
Title optimisation is only finished when you can see the effect. At G&F Verpakkingen, cleaning up 247 titles as part of the wider enrichment produced +34% organic clicks within three months and saved the team over 120 hours of manual editing. The biggest gains were not on the best-performing products but in the long tail: items that barely got impressions because of generic titles.
Use a simple measurement of your own: before the bulk run, export the average CTR per product page from Search Console, run the optimisation and compare the same set four to six weeks later. Watch impressions in particular — they usually rise before clicks do, because more specific titles start matching more queries.
Managing filler words per store
The default banned-word list covers the most common cases, but every industry has its own stop words. In a B2B packaging catalogue "premium" is meaningless, while in a luxury segment the same word can be part of the brand language. Use the global instructions in your store settings to ban extra words or explicitly allow them. Those instructions apply to every bulk job, so you only have to set them once.
Conclusion
Filler words like elegant, stylish, and luxury feel appealing, but in practice produce generic, non-distinguishing titles that give search engines and customers little to go on. Automatic filtering and deduplication solve this structurally, as the G&F Verpakkingen case shows: 214 titles in the first round, 33 in the second, all without manual work.
Want to see how many filler words have crept into your product titles? Start free and let pshly.ai analyze and clean up your titles.