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It does have an SEO impact. For our company we put it as a part of the blog right after the intro.

Thanks @Chirag Parmar do you think ‘after intro’ has better impact than the one in side? Recently, I have seen lot of companies move away from the side TOC.

• Yes to first question • Very good question. Was wondering it myself. In my experience a floating index works better especially for readers and the functional use case but not sure about SEO impact. https://vwo.com/ab-testing/ being a good example. @Kattu do you have any learning from experiment on having or not having index? Waiting for learning from others here. Thanks

Thanks @Tej, 🙌 IMO index seems like a right choice for a pillar content or a whitepaper. I am not sure if it would make sense for a blog. Will wait for others to share their learnings.

We actually did the exact A/B test this week. A jump-tag based index right after the intro of the blog (Variant A - original) v/s a side sticky index (Variant B - New) If you see the image, Variant 1 (the original) worked better. It was counterintuitive to what we thought would happen.

Hi Arpit! Table of contents has definitely worked for us. These jump links directly tend to appear on search results, and has increased CTRs considerably. In terms of placement, I've seen floating index like Tejaswi mentioned towards the left of the blog + simple list at the start; i have known the results only for the latter, no numbers to conclude for the former. It's good to decide what all headings must appear on it since that could impact a users scrolling from there.

Google reads the code for the blog, not ui of the landing page. Hence a side bar may make sense from a ux perspective. However, google favours jump links within the article more.

Thanks @Shireesh & @Aiswarya Menon this really helps.

@Chirag Parmar Why does Google prefer jump links within the article more? Vs side bar?

@Aiswarya Menon as long as you've added the sidebar to the blog’s schema tag it will work, however, while ranking a blog, google ignores the other pieces of code on the page from a content quality perspective. As a result, placing jump links within the content itself is a way of masking TOC as a part of the content. Plus it also acts as an internal link.

@Shireesh kudos on the culture of testing. Keep at it. So refreshing to see someone test such experiments

@Chirag Parmar If Google ignores all forms of code other than schema, isn't that counter-intuitive? Does selected crawling/reading in a webpage really happen? Which schema would you use for side nav bar?

@Tej - anything for the 0.5% increase in conversion. Really adds up! 👀

@Aiswarya Menon under the schema tags list there is a toc tag. You can look it up on schema.org . It is counterintuitive for google to ignore all other forms of code but they have done so to restrict blackhat SEO practices. If it is a container on the side bar you can add much more than just the toc to bombard your article with keywords. Selected crawling does happen. Google spiders look for specific sections of the page when ranking for page quality. All custom containers on the page are auto-ignored.

@Shireesh which tool have you used to test this?

@Mahima Bhatnagar - this is Google Optimize.

What matters is the intent of the article. There are established bloggers who continue using a table of contents while others don't use them. From an SEO perspective, my personal experience has been that not having a table of content doesn't make much difference. Adding the table of content for lengthier pieces makes it easier for the audience to scroll through the article.