Table of Contents May Be Hurting You
Day 1347 of research - that's 3 years, 252 days
Welcome to Crawl or No Crawl report for today. Before sharing the indexation test results, I come with news for everyone.
In 2024 I said that GSC data indicated the anchor links they create are getting whipped up by the Helpful Content System/classifier and treated as separate pages and causing “unhelpful” duplicate content.
People (mostly high level SEOs) who removed their TOC from their blogs saw upward movement they hadn’t see in over a year.
Turns out Google agrees with me
In the Google Creator Summit earlier this month, apparently someone on the team mentioned TOC and that using TOC plugins/widgets in our content is not helping and might be hurting our sites.
Someone in the room, Tomiko Harvey, a travel blogger - shared on her blog a summary of her takeaways from Google’s Search Team.
And the topic of today’s Confessions of an SEO is what I’ve been doing about this since Google seems to not be able to make headway on the canonical scoring.
And That’s The Good News
At last, I have something that will help. Its been in development these past 5 months and is finally into internal testing phase.
It’s a Wordpress Table of Contents plugin (TOC) that will be HELPFUL. To get on the advance notification list when its out of internal testing and available for licensing, go to Fix the Canonical Scoring in Helpful Content
Now for the Indexation Testing Data!