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.

 

[fisicx]

Internal linking a a very powerful SEO technique if done properly.

The structure of a website needs proper planning. It means considering the information flows across the pages so you create an engaging customer journey. You need multiple paths between the content which itself needs to be interesting, informative and add value.

Long pages work if the topic leads itself to long pages. If you were writing a page about a disease aimed at academics then you would expect it to be long. If you are answering a question about how eat a banana than a video and short description may suffice.

Breaking up a long page into separate pages can give Google more to index and use internal linking which as already mentioned Google likes.

It all depends on the purpose of the page and the target reader.

 

[ceeze]

Internal linking a a very powerful SEO technique if done properly.

The structure of a website needs proper planning. It means considering the information flows across the pages so you create an engaging customer journey. You need multiple paths between the content which itself needs to be interesting, informative and add value.

Long pages work if the topic leads itself to long pages. If you were writing a page about a disease aimed at academics then you would expect it to be long. If you are answering a question about how eat a banana than a video and short description may suffice.

Breaking up a long page into separate pages can give Google more to index and use internal linking which as already mentioned Google likes.

It all depends on the purpose of the page and the target reader.

Ok, so when you said splitting up the long pages you meant into multiple pages. I thought you meant splitting up with headings and subheadings.

One of my concerns with using a table of contents at the top of a page is that it makes it even longer and adds a barrier to the page before the user can get to the actual content. Thoughts?

 

[fisicx]

Depends on how you structure the links. The simplest way is to just have the links as a secondary horizontal menu across the top of the page or perhaps below the introduction.

This is a game walkthough. You can see the jumplinks below the intro:

https://fisicx.com/firmament/index.html

But ideally you also need internal linking and 'back to top' links. Simply adding a TOC to the top of the page won't work. You need to consider the whole UI/UX

Can you post a link to the page. Will be easier to advise on options.