How to avoid duplicate content with this structure?

[Fourjays]

I am making a small site to show off the apps and games I am going to be making. I don't really have anything different to say on my home page and just want to show my products there in their entirety (with some fancy AJAX scrolling loader thing when it gets longer ). I am managing to do this quite easily due to the great API that ProcessWire has.

The site structure is as follows:

- Home
-- Products (paginated)
--- Product 1
--- Product 2
--- ...etc...
-- Blog (paginated)
--- Post 1
--- Post 2
--- ...etc...
-- Contact

With this I am concerned about duplicate content. This structure feels the most correct and relevant way to handle the content (as opposed to having the products as direct children of "Home" alongside "Blog" and "Contact" which feels illogical). This structure also works better if the AJAX loader isn't available for a user (accessibility, no JS, etc) as I can display a bog standard link to "products/page2".

However, it seems Home and Products are going to have duplicate content. Is there a better way to handle this? Serve a simplified list on Products? Leave them the same but serve a "canonical link" tag in the head? Or am I worrying about nothing?

Another side issue with this is that the menu shows both "Home" and "Products". I could hide "Products" via the admin, but this also hides it (and its children) in the Sitemap which may not be ideal (unsure)?

Any advice or tips on how to handle this structure best would be greatly appreciated.

[Wanze]

However, it seems Home and Products are going to have duplicate content. Is there a better way to handle this? Serve a simplified list on Products? Leave them the same but serve a "canonical link" tag in the head? Or am I worrying about nothing?

Do you mean in terms of SEO?

If you don't need to show "Products" in the navigation, just skip the page when building the navigation - this way it'll show up in your sitemap but not in the navigation.

Sorry, I'm not sure if I understand the problem exactly

[Fourjays]

Yea, SEO is my primary concern. I think that duplicate content from a user perspective can be solved.

Maybe I'm trying to over-complicate things a bit, but what I'm sort of trying to achieve is to have "Home" be "Products" and then have "Blog" be alongside "Home" and not a child of it. Visibly I can do it. But in the Sitemap and SEO-wise it seems that "Home" and "Products" would appear as duplicates (although could probably modify the sitemap to ignore it as well).

Might be easier for me to stop trying to do something so weird and to just treat "Home" as a portal to the other two though.

[RyanJ]

I think Home should be just that, a portal to your products and blog. You could pull in a limited amount of products on the home page using the "limit" selector and then offset them with the "start" so they do not show up on both home page and products page.

If you are set on wanting to display all of your products on your home page, this is what I would do. "Products" page would be used as a place holder in the backend and I would assign it a blank template and hide it.This way if a user accesses mysite/products, they are thrown a 404.

[Fourjays]

I think Home should be just that, a portal to your products and blog. You could pull in a limited amount of products on the home page using the "limit" selector and then offset them with the "start" so they do not show up on both home page and products page.

 

If you are set on wanting to display all of your products on your home page, this is what I would do. "Products" page would be used as a place holder in the backend and I would assign it a blank template and hide it.This way if a user accesses mysite/products, they are thrown a 404.

Thanks. Think I'm probably going to go with the portal. Good tip on the limit and start too.