
Originally Posted by
PaulEchere
Even though there might be correlation between good rankings and the presence of a TOC - I don't necessarily think there is causation.
What you see when you go through well-ranking websites (though not all of them and not everywhere) is that they try to do as much as possible to improve their content and in some cases that involved adding a TOC.
From my own experience, I once went the route of adding a TOC almost everywhere and it had no visible effect on my rankings, yet it did have a negative effect on the clicks my affiliate links get.
Generally I want a person to visit my page, find what they want quickly (usually the most relevant information is right around the top of the page) and follow my link to set up an account with a bookie.
That TOC experiment I had reduced the number of clicks because now a large portion of the page's top, especially on mobile, was occupied by a TOC, which most readers (let's be frank) aren't interested in.
Now, I still use something akin to a TOC, but in moderation. I usually have several TOC-ish links around the top of the page, that would lead to the places most people might want to see and also places from where they get sent to a bookie. All the main content I want the user to see first is there and is visible as soon as they open the page.