In a recent video, Google’s Gary Illyes, an engineer on the search team, shared details about how the search engine evaluates web page quality during indexing.
This information is timely, as Google has consistently raised the bar for “quality” content.
Quality: A key factor in indexing and 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 quality of the page and, consequently, its ranking in the search results.
Illyes explains:
“The final step of indexing is deciding whether to include the page in Google’s index. This process, called index selection, depends heavily on the quality of the page and the previously collected signals.”
This detail is especially relevant to publishers and SEO professionals struggling to index content.
You could be doing everything right from a technical point of view. However, your pages will not be indexed if they do not meet a certain quality threshold.
Additionally, Google has previously confirmed that high-quality content is crawled more often, which is crucial to staying competitive in search results.
One of Google’s goals for the year is to conserve crawling resources by prioritizing pages that “deserve” to be crawled, emphasizing the urgency of meeting Google’s quality standard.
Signals and duplicate content management
Illyes talked about how Google analyzes signals.
Some signals, such as the rel= “canonical” annotation, are simple, while others, such as the importance of a page on the Internet, are more complex.
Google also uses “duplicate groupings”, where similar pages are grouped together and a single canonical version is selected to represent the content in search results. The canonical version is determined by comparing the quality signals collected on each duplicate page.
Additional indexing information
Along with insight into quality assessment, Illyes shared these notable details:
HTML parsing and semantic issues: Illyes talked about how Google analyzes the HTML of a web page and fixes any semantic problems it finds. If unsupported tags are used within the file < head> element, may cause indexing problems.
Identification of the main content: Illyes mentioned that Google focuses on the “main content or centerpiece of a page” when analyzing it. This suggests that optimizing the core content of a web page is more important than incremental technical changes.
Index storage: Illyes revealed that Google’s search database is spread over thousands of computers. This is an interesting context for the scale of Google’s infrastructure.
Watch the full video below:
Why SEJ cares
As Google continues to prioritize high-quality content in its indexing and ranking processes, SEO professionals should be aware of how it evaluates quality.
By knowing the factors that influence indexing, such as relevance, quality, and signal calculation, SEO professionals know better what to aim for in order to reach Google’s indexing threshold.
How this can help you
To ensure your content meets Google’s quality standards, consider the following steps:
Focus on comprehensively creating content that fits your audience’s needs and problems. Identify current trends in search demand and align your content with those topics. Make sure your content is well structured and easy to navigate. Implement schema markup and other structured data to help Google better understand context. Update and refresh your content regularly to maintain relevance and value.
You can potentially increase your indexed pages and crawl rate by prioritizing quality, relevance and meeting search demand.
Frequently asked questions
What is involved in Google’s “index selection” process?
The index selection process is the final step in Google indexing, where it decides whether to include the page in the search index.
This decision is based on the quality of the page and various signals collected during the initial evaluation.
If the page does not meet the quality threshold set by Google, it runs the risk of not being indexed. For this reason, an emphasis on generating high-quality content is critical to visibility in the Google search engine.
How does Google handle duplicate content and what role do quality signals play in this process?
Google handles duplicate content through a process called “duplicate clustering,” where similar pages are grouped together. A canonical version is then selected to represent the group in search results.
The canonical version is selected based on the quality signals associated with each duplicate page. These signals can include attributes such as appropriate use of the rel=”canonical” tag, or more complex factors such as the perceived importance of a page on the Internet.
Ultimately, the canonical version chosen reflects Google’s assessment of which page is most likely to provide the best value to users.
Featured image: YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, April 2024.
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