Product content length & links within product description

[JustinBSLW]

Hello,

I have questions regarding content length and links within descriptions.  With our ecommerce site, we have thousands of products, each with a unique description. In the product description, I have links to the parent category and grandparent category (if it has one) in the main product text which is generally about 175 words. Then I have a last paragraph that's about 75 words that includes links to our main homepage and our main product catalogue page.

Is the content length long enough? I used to use text that was 500 words, and shortening it I still rank when launching new products, so I don't think an increase in text length will have any additional benefit. I do see conflicting information when I do searches, with some people recommending a minimum of 300 words and some saying to try and go a 1000 for category pages.

In regards to the links, I noticed a competitor has stopped following this format, so I'm unsure if I should keep going too. Is it too many links to have each of the products link back to the main catalogue and homepage? Is it good to have links with anchor text to the categories a product is in? There are breadcrumbs on the page with these links already. There are already have heaps of links on our pages (footer, and a right sidebar with image links to relevant categories), so my pages do get flagged for too many links.

Thanks!

[EGOL]

A short product description on my sites is about 100 words and a unique photo with a generous caption - so about 150 words total.

Most products get a much longer description of at least 300 to 500 words and at least one unique photo.  The short description described above is often upgraded after we receive a few questions about a product or after we get more experience using the product ourselves (we have experience using almost every product that we sell).  When the descriptions are improved, the rankings often go up and the page starts pulling in traffic for long tail keywords.  These are the two benefits that we see from improving product descriptions.

Better selling products and those that receive lots of questions can have even longer descriptions of 500 to 1000 words and more photos.  Best selling products also usually have separate articles that explain how to select the product, how to use them, how to maintain/repair and more.  We always have links to these articles within product descriptions.  Our product pages and article pages often rank #1 and #2 in the SERPs.  We also have lots of #1, #2, #3 positions as a result of our article pages.

These really long descriptions usually have the essential info in the first one or two paragraphs.  Information after that has subheading to make it easy for shoppers to scan and skip/read parts of the description that they want.

If we have a product that gets a few returns we often add information about the product that caused people to return it.  We would rather kill a few sales than incur costly returns.