Use menu structure for permalinks

Question

I'm building a blog that is kind of split into 5 different parts. Example: I try to combine 4 brands and the company owning those brands on one website. Let's say the company is called "Apple" and the 4 brands are called "iPad", "iPhone", "iPod" and "Mac".

What I want to do is to slice the website into 1 part for each of the brands and 1 part for company in general. So when I go to apple.com I get the home page of the company. The iPhone sub-part of the page can be found under apple.com/iphone, the iPad one under apple.com/ipad and so on.

For each of those 5 parts I have created a menu-location in my Wordpress theme and a category. Under the "Apple" part of the website, there is a menu item called "Products" and it has sub-items for each product. The product parts of the website have a menu item called "Product Info". Both menu items, e.g. "Products/iPad" of the "Apple" part and "Product Info" of the "iPad" part of the website are linked to the same page that lies under "Product pages/iPad" in the page administration of Wordpress. Thus, the permalink of the page is apple.com/product-pages/ipad. What I want it that this very same page can be accessed via apple.com/products/ipad AND via apple.com/ipad/product-info - depending on what menu was used to get to that page. (I don't care whether the page is still reachable unter apple.com/product-pages/ipad afterwards, or not.)

How can I make this possible without having to duplicate the menu structure in the pages administration (and thus having to create the iPad page 2 times with the same content)?

For better understanding, here's a menu structure -> page structure mapping.

Menu Structure:

• Apple (a) -> Posts from all 5 Categories
  • Products (b) -> Page (1)
    • iPad (c) -> Page (3)
    • iPhone (d) -> Page (4)
    • iPod (e) -> Page (5)
    • Mac (f) -> Page (6)
• iPad (g) -> Posts from category "iPad"
  • Product Info (h) -> Page (3)
• iPhone (i) -> Posts from category "iPhone"
  • Product Info (j) -> Page (4)
• iPod (k) -> Posts from category "iPod"
  • Product Info (l)-> Page (5)
• Mac (m) -> Posts from category "Mac"
  • Product Info (n) -> Page (6)

Page Structure:

• Product Overview (1) -> Linked in menu item (b)
• Product Pages (2) -> Not linked, used for structure purposes only
  • iPad (3) -> Linked in menu items (c) and (h)
  • iPhone (4) -> Linked in menu items (d) and (j)
  • iPod (5) -> Linked in menu items (e) and (l)
  • Mac (6) -> Linked in menu items (f) and (n)

Or is there a better way to achieve my goal? Thanks in advance! :)

Answer 1

From a SEO perspective this would qualify as double content and you could get penalized by search engines for it unless you specify the right canonical URL or something, but the best practice would be to redirect one of the URL's to the other. Whichever you consider the most important.

To assist you with your question; You can make custom menu stuctures (in the Appearance > Menus section). That way you can include the same page in a menu structure as much as you want without having to create duplicate pages. And quite frankly I wouldn't use a different URL for purposes mentioned earlier.

EDIT:

To be able to edit how the URL is formed you could edit the url of the parent page (product-pages) to anything you want. I believe any child pages you create will carry the same parent name. But if you really want to turn the URL forming around, you should look into creating custom post types, where you have the most freedom of creating a URL that suits you.