We know that using a "Table of Contents" helps ranking and while Dori was teaching a basic on-page class, someone asked her if it made a difference where you put it. Dori didn’t know the answer to it, so we test this out.
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We do know using a table of contents helps ranking. We've tested that and when I was teaching a basic on page class someone asked me if it made a difference where we put it and I said I don't know. We haven't tested it yet so let's test it.
So, we did and since we used a plugin that I use for table of contents. It's called easy TOC. It has three placements, it has the top, middle and bottom and I have screenshots of each one of those. Because it actually affects the whole site we had to use three different sites and so these were the three different sites that we used and this is the example of it being at top.
Just imagine the header up here and this would be the first h1 tag on your site, on your page and that's where the table of contents was. In the in the example of it being in the middle, this is your first h1 with your header content like menu up here and this is the example of where it is in the middle. It's just like the intro paragraph is above it. It places these automatically so it's not like you can go in and place it where you want to. It does it automatically.
In the middle for them is right below the first paragraph, like your intro paragraph and then this is the example of the bottom and you can see this is at the bottom where recent results, stuff like that. It is definitely right above the footer at the bottom.
We put the pages through the indexer and let it go and the results are it does matter. In both tests, the middle leaps to the top on the first indexing but then in test one not by much and as you can see in the graphs below and here is our legend here: red highlight meant top, green highlight in middle, black was bottom. I screenshotted our stuff in Trello because we check on these a lot to see if there's the movement.
So, I screenshotted it every couple days and you can see the green was on top and then the green was in the middle and then a little bit of green and then the red, a little bit of green and red and stuff like that, for both of these tests. So, it was going back and forth.
We know one thing for sure is the bottom totally lost. You don't want to put your table of contents on the bottom but it doesn't really matter if you put it at the very very top or beneath the intro paragraph. I think whatever makes the best user sense but don't put it at the bottom, at least not for SEO purposes.