Pages Question

Just wanted to check if there is a better way to do this:

Say I have a menu with a section called Products and it has several submenu items e.g. Product 1, Product 2 etc.

I am using pages app to create Products, then sub pages below it. However I am not really wanting a Products page on the front end (I have the url set to the first product, whats the best way to achieve this?

Currently I have a pages template assigned to the index.php in this section. Should I have an empty index.php, or some other method such as no path to an index.php e.g. /products/?

Even though I have set index.php to not be indexed, its still showing up with regions in the admin.