Use as much text on your page as is necessary to help the website visitors make an educated decision and convert. Try testing short copy/long copy.

Home page: You won't need a ton of copy on this page. Use this page to make a good first impression, establish that you are trustworthy a legit.

Category Pages: Use copy to help shoppers drill-down and find the specific items they are looking for. Help make their shopping process quicker and easier.

Product Pages: Most importantly, make sure you have unique copy here. Avoid manufacturer provided copy. Try to write it in a human voice. Get extra copy on the page by allowing product reviews.

If you want to permanently remove URLs from the index, this is the basic process:

Have your developer implement NoIndex, Follow to all pages that have the URL parameter you want removed. For example, if the URL contains categoryFilter= (like above), then add the NoIndex, Follow tag to the of the page. Do this for all URL paramters you want removed from the index.

Make sure Google is allowed to crawl those pages. If they are blocked by robots.txt or told not to crawl them via Google Webmaster Tools, Google will not be able to see the newly implement NoIndex, Follow tag.

Then, give it some time and wait. It may take Google a long time to crawl all of these paramtered URLs again. Fallout of the index might be slow.

Once the URLs are gone, consider blocking the crawling of them via robots.txt or in GWT parameter handling.

As Dirk said, this is not a concern. A typical e-commerce site is going to have the same images on product pages, category pages, brand pages, etc. In general, I would recommend using fresh images across your site, but a bit of re-use when it makes sense is not a problem at all.

Paid links are always a gray area. Yahoo Directory and other authoritative directories have always been out there over the years as a recommended spot to get a link, despite costing money.

My recommendation: Go for the link if you think it's a good site and may send some traffic your way.

One or two obviously paid links that all your competitors also have, isn't likely to cause an issue for you. If this is a tactic you are intentionally abusing and have a lot of paid links-- then you are going to be at high risk.

I'm sure others might disagree with my response...