Google’s Indexing Process: When Is “Quality” Determined?

In a recent video, Google’s Gary Illyes, a search team engineer, shared details about how the search engine assesses webpage quality during indexing. 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. Knowing the factors influencing indexing, such as relevance, quality, and signal calculation, SEO professionals know better what to aim for to meet Google’s indexing threshold. The index selection process is the final step in Google’s indexing, where it decides whether to include the page in the search index. How does Google handle duplicate content, and what role do quality signals play in this process?