My site filmmerchant.com has a strong page rank on the main page and
on a couple of the side pages.  However, all of the product pages have
a page rank of 0.  It appears to me that the way that I have set up
the navigation is making the pages unspiderable.  I've heard that
maybe I have too many variables in the urls for the spider to handle
it.  I'd love to figure out what I can do to make the site spiderable,
as I'm getting next to no traffic at the moment.

Hi, 

This is one of the banes of uses mod_rewrite none of the SEO's tell
you about. In fact it is so obvious I wonder that anyone uses
mod_rewrite at all.

Take this link for example:
http://www.filmmerchant.com/9-dollar-dvds/?ls=181

Now, in the bot's mind (any bot) the page listed (?ls=181) is 1) an
uncertain type 2)  3 levels down (there for of little importance) and
3) comprised of only links to other pages. (this is a link of your
search result page. )

This link, a product link:
http://www.filmmerchant.com/exercise/ambient-water.php?DVD=82163

is 1) on the third level (so of very little importance and 2) has only
a variance of words with every other page in that directory of 23 word
groups. So it is not much different.

Remember that we are dealing with a bot here, not something that
thinks, but something that doesn't think, it just records what it
sees. It is an Automaton` nothing more.

Now, I can see that you are using these pages to describe different
movies, and that your search levels are in fact on the top level, not
three deep, but the bot doesn't know that, it just goes with what it
sees, and a page three levels down that doesn't have much content, and
that content is only different by 20 - 30 words per page for every
page in that directory, can't be very important, .. can it? Put that
way, no, and this is exactly how that bot reacts.

You should also read the Google Webmasters area, found off the main
page, regarding the use of sitemaps.. I would strongly recommend
looking at this first, before looking at code rewrites. It is possible
that if you created a well-formed sitemap.html, you could get much
better results from your current system.

thanks, 

webadept-ga