Table of Contents on Pages - Are they always necessary?

[taymik3398]

I work for a marketing company, and I manage a web dev team. Our SEO director has started asking us to add a table of contents to every page and post they create for clients. Most of the resources I find suggest that a table of contents is not necessary for pages that are not long or that are just standard service pages, but that for TOS pages, articles, other longer content they are helpful. He is asking for TOC on pages with less than 400 words. Am I right to push back on this? I don't want to step on toes, but but as a web designer, from a UX perspective it seems like taking up so much real estate at the top of the page is doing more harm then good, when the page is so short.

 

[fisicx]

It's clear they have picked up this SEO tip from somewhere and want to apply it everywhere.

It's not necessary and in some cases will be counter productive.

Rather than a TOC consider using a sub-menu for the page. This would be a row of links below the title or possibly below the introduction.