Best Strategy for FAQ & Canonical?

[MrSem]

I have an FAQ database setup on my site and there's about 30 questions in 6 categories so 5 questions per category which is a pretty good page size for one category.  I'm trying to determine the best strategy for publishing them from both a user and SEO standpoint.

From a user standpoint, I want to have one page per category.  Dumping them into a page with all 30 questions is not user-friendly and some categories are very unrelated to others.  I should note that Google did already index a page that does have all the questions on it, but I was just planning on changing that page to just have 6 links to each of the category pages so then I don't have to bother with 301 redirect or removing the pages in the site's Search Console.

There's also an option to to link the questions for the entire FAQ or from the category list to one page with just that question and answer.

So my thinking at this point is to as I said, just change the page that has all 30 questions to a list of the categories and link to category pages having the questions for that category and disable the individual question pages.

Or would it be beneficial from an SEO page to have google index the individual question pages and link back to the category page and put a canonical tag on the category pages?  In other words the question then becomes, index the category pages or index the individual question pages?

The other issue is the answers for some of the questions are lengthy, multiple paragraphs, and the FAQ has the option to have a hide/unhide feature on the answers so you can easily see all the questions first then expand the answers on the ones you are interested in.  However I thought I heard Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is by default hidden on page load.  I guess this would then give a reason for going with the indexing of the individual question pages.  But it seems to me, you can't put the canonical tag on the category pages and point it to the individual question page.  And if you put the canonical tag on the individual question page linking it to the category page, then the individual page won't necessarily get indexed will it?

[Guest]

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[MrSem]

I think I've come to the same conclusion.  On many blog sites you may have multiple recent posts on the home page and then individual post pages for those same posts.  Similar to FAQs.  Google is smart enough to see, oh this is just another type of organization of this content that exists on individual pages.

It appears even though pages higher in the hierarchy are supposed to carry more weight, that Google favors indexing the individual pages deeper down than the "category" pages higher up.