My product pages have no weight / links from root domains with the Moz tool bar

[nawgie]

Hi,

When I view my home page (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk) with the Moz toolbar, I see a good PA and a good amount of links from root domains. As I go down the site, it seems to get worse. The category pages (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Category/0/Straight_Foods.html) have a little but not much and then from this point onwards, it's nothing. The product page (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Item/Straight_Foods~Sunflower_Seeds/SUNH/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html) is reporting to have no root domain links but I am not sure why. Interestingly, when I click through to a review page (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/StockReview/0/SUNH/0/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html) it does have some juice.

Would anyone be able help on why this is happening and what I need to be looking at in order to resolve it please?

EDIT:

I've been looking at the hyperlinks and notice something odd. If I review the score with the first link below, it gives a score of 1, but the second gives a PA of 13 with one root domain linked.

1:http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Item/Straight_Foods~Sunflower_Seeds/SUNH/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html

2:http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Item/Straight_Foods%7ESunflower_Seeds/SUNH/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html

Please note the "%7E" instead of the "~" in the URL. The browser appears to show the ~ character no matter what but the rank of the page changes. I don't understand what the Moz toolbar is doing with this. Note: This behaviour only happens in Mozilla Firefox, in chrome both the rankings are zero for each URL.

Many Thanks.

[maxweb]

%7E is the ascii code for ~. I'm not certain whats happening, but sometimes when copy and pasting rich text (like from word), the browser will see the ascii code and not the actual ~ character. This makes internal linking a bit awkward and can result in duplicate content, although I'm not sure if search engines would see this example as a problem.

I've noticed that you do not have rel="canonical" tags set up, it's worth putting them in just to be on the safe side.

I would also have a word with your developers as the urls are very long and messy. Also, try to avoid using upper case and avoid using non-alpha numerical characters (such as ~) except for hyphens. Something like http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/straight-foods/sunflower-seeds/premium-sunflower-hearts would look a lot better and avoid problems like this occurring in the future. The only problem is that changing the url can temporarily affect search rankings and you must be sure to set up 301 redirects properly.

[maxweb]

It's important to remember that the Moz toolbar is uses the moz crawlers so will not have as much information as Google's own crawlers. I would imagine that a lot of the product pages are newer than other pages in the website, so there is a good chance that they will not have any PA as the moz crawlers may not have crawled them yet.

The PA of sub-pages and product pages will mostly be down to internal linking. If you are worried about the pages carrying weight for the website, there are a few things you can do. First of all, run the website through a crawler tool like screaming frog or xenu. These will tell you if the pages can be crawled by search engines (if the pages do not show up in the results, they can't be crawled) and also tell you how many internal links point to the pages. Also, have a look through the website yourself, see how easy it is to access product pages without using search forms. As a general rule, no page should be more than 3 clicks away on an ecommerce site, but this is open to discussion.

Remember though that it is perfectly normal for a large website to have a tiered internal linking structure. If all the pages on the website had the same authority then it would look unnatural. I'm fairly sure Rand has done some talks about best practice for internal linking.