We have been using a TOC for user experience on long form articles for some time and not paid much attention to whether it is helping with rankings.
It has allowed us to create more link opportunities on our pages but haven't tested it on its own, without other possible factors. We test out if a TOC in itself, is a ranking factor.
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Transcription Below
This comes from Alex Maggs-Wellings, he is a new tester and part of the crew. What he wanted to look at was is having a table of contents a ranking factor. What he was thinking about is that it is kind of the cool thing to do for the last year and a half. If you have a longer form article, you put a table of contents on the top, Wikipedia style of a page where they always have a table of contents. The concept is that, is it, in itself, a ranking factor.
The test page gets a table of contents and boom, it goes to number one.
What we are looking at, if you really think about it, is anchor text. It is anchor text that exists on a page, it is links that exists on the page. This goes back to our home to home link. The concept that even if you have a link that points to itself, a table of contents link is going to be an old school html anchor link, it’s got that little hashtag that goes to a lower part of the page where that hashtag exists.
That is I think is really the same content. We are building links on a page, links are a ranking factor even if they go to themselves, anchor text is a factor even if it is internal or external or going to itself.
This is really more of a confirmation of what we’ve seen in a lot of other tests in a more formalized table of contents. In my opinion, while people look at a table of contents as a ranking factor, really what it is, is having links on a page as a ranking factor.
What is great is that we know that having links is a ranking factor and you can do it in the table of contents and that is done in a way that makes sense to people that does not look bad, doesn’t look spammy, doesn’t look in the way, it is very common in these pages. So if you need to put that anchor text out there, a table of contents is a good way to do it.