TOCs and LLM Crawls

[ceeze]

Has anyone tested, or know of an asset they can share, discussing the benefits/drawbacks of using TOCs on long-form webpages?

 

[JS Girard]

I don,t think anyone's tested it as such, but it's worth noting that no one has reported any ingestion problems. That being said it's likely that the majority of the content from the biggest source that might be affected (I.e. Wikipedia, Fandom and other large wikis) was compiled separately rather than crawled as such.

Is this prompted by the investigation from i think last fall (i don't remember who did it) that suggested that part of the HCU disaster was caused by such ToCs triggering duplicate content penalties?

 

[fisicx]

A TOC is essentially a set of jumplinks - which have been around for years. In fact they are one of the earliest HTML specs.

They work really well and Google has no problem using then. Use them if the add value. Or question why you need such a long page. Splitting long pages can improve your ranking.

 

[ceeze]

A TOC is essentially a set of jumplinks - which have been around for years. In fact they are one of the earliest HTML specs.

They work really well and Google has no problem using then. Use them if the add value. Or question why you need such a long page. Splitting long pages can improve your ranking.

So do they actually help crawlers? Or would you say not really, but they help user navigation for long content? and it would be more helpful to break up long pages with proper use of headings and subheadings - this is what would help ranking.