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Matt Cutts mentioned at SXSW that Google wants to take into consideration the quality of the experience ecommerce merchants provide and work this into how they rank in SERPs.  Here's what he said if you missed it:

"We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.”

My question; how exactly could Google decide if a merchant provides a low and high quality experience?  I would image it would be very easy for Google to decide this with merchants in their Trusted Store program. I wonder what other data sets Google could realistically rely upon to make such a judgment.  Any ideas or thoughts are appreciated.

Too many links on a page can make it difficult for bots to crawl your site.  If you have over 100 links on page, make certain you have a sitemap that lays out a road map for the bots.

If your site is being effectively crawled, don't worry about it.  I would worry if the linking structure is impacting the user experience or if deeper pages weren't getting crawled.

Yes, one of my exact match domains outranks a much stronger domain even with thin content and zero marketing efforts.  It don't think it should and I don't think it always will outrank stronger domains.

If you go to Google Webmaster Central, you will see a mantra of non-following interlinks for sites under your control.  The amount of risk you are undertaking with interlinking depends how you do it and the how your link profile looks overall.  Do-follow contextual links in the footer would be the most risky and a bad idea.  If you put a single do-follow link to another store/site (using the store name in the anchor) in the "About Us" page, you may be safe but I have read reports of getting a -10 for doing even this.

Ultimately, the more you leverage your sites for juice - the more risk you undertake (pardon the stating the obvious).

BTW, I concur with EGOL about doing one big site.  I've done it both ways and everything is so much easier if you focus on a single store. Better to spread your icing nice and thick over a cupcake than thinly over a sheet cake.

Here's my rules of thumb for my category pages.

1. Write quality content not SEO copy.  Keyword stuffed content will do more harm than good.  Don't repeat keywords more than 1-2 times.

2. 500 words is a minimum.  I use 1300-1500.  Again, focus on quality content that will actually describe the products and provide the reader with substance.

3. I put it beneath the products and check my work with the On-Page Optimization tool.

4. Be an expert on your products and how they are used.  Transfer this knowledge to your cat and product pages.  Offer content that no one else does.