How can we improve our e-commerce site architecture to help best preserve Page Authority?

[danatanseo]

Today I installed the SEOMoz toolbar for Firefox (very cool, highly recommended). I was comparing our site http://www.ccisolutions.com to this competitor: http://www.uniquesquared.com

For the most part, the deeper I go in our site the more the page authority drops. We have a few exceptions where the page authority of a subcategory page is actually better than the cat. page one level up.

In comparison, when I was looking at http://www.uniquesquared.com I noticed that their page authority stays at "21" on every single category page I visit. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Is this potentially a problem with the tool bar or, is there something significantly different about their site architecture that allows them to maintain that PA across all category and sub category pages?

Is there something fundamentally wrong with our (http://www.ccisolutions.com) site architecture?

I understand that we have longer URLs, but this is an old store with a lot of SKUs, so we have decided not to remove the /category/ and /product/ from the URLs because the 301 redirects that would result wouldn't pass all of the authority they've built up over the years.

Interested to know viewpoints on the site architecture and how it might be improved. Thanks!

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Dana,

I don't know the operation of the toolbar well enough to say, but we did roll out an index update this afternoon. I think it started after you wrote this, but for the heck of it, could you come back and look at this and see if you're still seeing the same PA on every page you visit? If so, it's probably something to send an email to help@seomoz.org about, as they can look into it better.

Thanks!

[danatanseo]

Thanks Keri. I will take a look and if it is the same I'll definitely email.

[danatanseo]

Hi Keri,

I just went back and checked this again and the same results just happened. Here is another post in Q&A from today where someone else is noticing the same problem:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/page-authority-is-the-same-on-every-page-of-my-site

I am going to email help as you suggested. Thanks!