I think you are being blinded by your bias, yes.

If you, the web designer, insert a link to your site into the footer of all the sites you design, that is not an editorial link. It's not a link that the site owner created of their own volition because they think it's valuable content. In fact, if a company is hiring an outside web designer, they might have no idea how to remove the link from their footer. They might not even notice it.

The search engines know all this, and it's why they don't like footer links. They are well aware that web designers, Wordpress theme developers, and so on have been using this technique for years.

Unless I'm missing something, there doesn't seem to be a way to get Google to show more than 100 results on a page. Our site has about 8,000 pages, and I don't relish the idea of manually exporting 80 SERPs.

That's really interesting. I strongly believe that one page for each variation of a product, whether it's color or size, worsens user experience. But I'm working against a near-religious devotion to having as many pages as possible on the site, based on the idea that more pages definitely means better SEO. Any tips for overcoming that?

Load time was pretty long. How are your file sizes?

The category pages definitely don't look clean and professional right now, and that will impact conversion rate. You have enough copy on the category pages to establish relevancy, so I would be extremely surprised if your rankings went down after you stopped showing the product descriptions on the category pages.

If you're hesitant, would it be possible to test it both ways? Choose a couple of categories and pull the product descriptions off them. See what happens to their rankings and traffic.

I'm not looking for a precise number, obviously. I'm more interested in a general range.

More text means more long-tail and synonym opportunities, but of course you don't want too much copy above the fold, pushing your products down. Maybe you can get away with a short paragraph or two at the top of the page.

You can always put more copy below the products, but in a recent SEOmoz e-commerce webinar, the presenter seemed to think that was silly and unnecessary. He even suggested that the algo might intentionally ignore text below products, since it's clearly not intended to be read.

What do you think?

Is your company a local one, like a pizza place or a shoe-repair business? If so, then people who are in your industry but not in your city are not actually competitors. If you're both national companies in direct competition, though, I find it hard to believe they'd accept your guest post.