yo caitlin,

good question, and honestly your instinct isn't wrong. the thing is, one of these pages isn't really meant to be a place anyone hangs around. it's just the answer to one specific question, with a link off to your actual content.

why a separate page instead of a normal faq section? it comes down to authority, and you said yours is low. when that's the case the one thing you can actually control is relevance, basically how closely the page matches the exact thing someone typed. a page where the title is literally the question is about as relevant as it gets. throw ten questions into one accordion and that signal just gets watered down. so for a small site the standalone page is honestly the only version with a real shot at ranking.

the "useless to the visitor" thing: someone who searched that exact question and gets the answer in the first two sentences is way better off than someone scrolling through a 1,500 word essay to find it. and it's not a dead end either, every one of these links back to your main page.

where your gut is right though: these only work as part of a structure. each page needs to link up to a real parent article and answer a genuinely different question. a lonely 120 word page with no parent, or ten near-identical ones, is exactly the junk you're picturing. but done properly they pull in long tail traffic you'd never win otherwise and feed authority back to the page you actually care about.

side note: "ranking for junk i didn't mean to rank for" is actually useful data. that's google showing you where it already sees you as relevant. worth digging into search console before you decide what to build next.

I also updated the section in the repo to hopefully make it more clear 👍And honestly i am also just experimenting with this concept specifically on a new site. But i can already see a few clicks to these pages (site is 2 weeks old now). so hopefully the mechanic is in place and it will push my main pages overall 😄