In a recent video, Google’s Gary Illyes, a search team engineer, shared details about how the search engine assesses webpage quality during indexing.
This information is timely, as Google has steadily raised the bar for “quality” content.
Quality: A Key Factor in Indexing & Crawling Frequency
Illyes described the indexing stage, which involves analyzing a page’s textual content, tags, attributes, images, and videos.
During this stage, Google also calculates various signals that help determine the page’s quality and, consequently, its ranking in search results.
Illyes explains:
“The final step in indexing is deciding whether to include the page in Google’s index. This process, called index selection, largely depends on the page’s quality and the previously collected signals.”
This detail is especially relevant for publishers and SEO professionals struggling to get content indexed.
You could be doing everything right from a technical standpoint. However, your pages won’t get indexed if they don’t meet a certain quality threshold.
Further, Google has previously confirmed that high-quality content is crawled more frequently, which is crucial for staying competitive in search results.