Here are my two cents -
_We have ecommerce sites and the 1st crawl flags – as appears typical
- too many on-page links. We display up to 20 products (each with three links!)
and I’m trying to push to have fewer but meeting resistance from colleagues.
We have links duplicated all over the site believing it eases navigation._
- _I do not think that Google or any other search engines have any such problem with too many internal links. Did you receive any such warning I Google Webmaster Tools? That would be weird though. Ebay, Amazon have loads of links site wide. Unless the page has some insane amount of internal links, I do not see any reason that it would affect the ranking.
However, it makes sense to have fewer products displayed on a page as it can directly affect page loading time. If your website is taking too long time to load just because the page has loads of content, you should go for pagination and applying rel=prev and rel=next._
My question is just how critical is the number of products displayed
and the resulting volume of links to SEO results?
Yeah. It is critical that a page has some products. It can be anything like – 20, 30 or 50. Just trynot to cross the logical limit. Think like this, if your product page contains 20000 products, would your visitors mind scrolling down the page. I do not think so. They will use the navigation or search option.
Also we currently have collections of products displayed
across several pages which of course have the same page title and this is flagged
as a duplication error.
_It seems you are talking about canonical issue. If the same product is accessible via different URLs, you need to follow this – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html . _