URGENT:   I checked the text on a few of your product pages, then searched for a snippet of your product description in quotes.  Your descriptions are posted on other sites.   And that text on your site for some products is verbatim identical to the product descriptions displayed on amazon.co.uk.   That is deadly.    Google is filtering several other websites where this same text appears verbatim.  I see amazon with verbatim and four filtered results here.  So, I would be sure that the text on my site is unique.   If you are spreading it to amazon, rewrite what is on your site.  If other people are stealing your text, that's a harder problem to solve.

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If this was my site, I would do the following with the category page.  I am not saying that everyone is going to agree with me, but this is where I would bet my money and time.

-- Include two to three sentences, in proper language, about each of the products.  Give the visitor enough information so he/she can decide to click.  Don't give me a whiff and make me click to taste it.  People who buy tea are the kind of people who don't mind reading by hate clicking into fifteen pages just to get some idea about the product.

-- Personally, I would ditch the hover-over effect and get that text onto the page.  You NEVER know how search engines are going to treat it.  You never know how devices are going to treat it, or how old men like me, who enjoy their tea are going to react when it doesn't seem to work when I click on it.  Also, I believe in getting all of my info out for the visitor.  Don't make the visitor click to another page unless he is really interested.

-- I would show the rating on the page.  Ratings  are like bling.  Flaunt them.

Yes, lots of people think that "only the first link counts".  So, I would say that is a "general belief".

To me it makes more sense to give higher credit to links that are used in multiple locations.  Certainly they would be links that the webmaster wants to present to the visitor in more locations and contexts.  So, if I was Google, I would count those destination pages as "more important".

Who knows what Google really does?

Now, this is wrong for a host of reasons,

This is right for two reason (it serves the customer by making financing more obvious and it may serve the dealer if he profits from financing).

This might be right if the dealer profits from financing and search engines give extra weight to pages that have multiple links in the persistent navigation (they surely must be more important pages if linked to twice in the template - though many SEOs will disagree with me).

I see nothing wrong with it.

My main site has multiple links to multiple pages in the template.

I hope I didn't offend you, that is not what I was going for.

You didn't. Absolutely not.

I responded with "what I do" rather than "what I think" because, honestly, I don't think about doing those types of promotions.  I write content and the content performs well.  It doesn't matter if it is published on a weak domain or a strong one, it tends to rank well most of the time - against retail or informational competitors.   It almost never ranks well immediately, but it slowly climbs the SERPs.  In a year - or two - it is usually on the first page of Google.

I make a big investment in the content, not in its promotion or placement.

I don't think that everyone can do this.  I am lucky that lots of people like my writing.  I've been doing it for over 50 years and have been fortunate to have many excellent editors, who each taught me different things.  At the same time, my writing only performs well for a limited range of topics - those that I have been exposed to for a very long time.

But on the other hand I have seen companies that might gross 20k in a month "buy" an article from a major publisher and then gross 200k that month.

These are remarkable situations that I have never seen.  My content pulls in lots of traffic, but none of it is written for the purpose of selling.  It is written to answer questions posed by students, retail customers, or simply curious people.  Each of my sites have has a store and products related to my content are sold there. But, my profits are mainly from ads.

The articles on our website are done in house and have a cost of $500 and up each.

We don't pay for articles on any other site, we don't submit our articles to any other site, if we see our articles on any other site we file DMCA or  take other action.  We have not done any linkbuilding for about eight years.

We publish and if our visitors like the article they share it for us.  The goal is to have our content market itself and for our visitors to become our ambassadors.  Each article is made with that type of goal and the quality to make that happen.

Don't spend time or money on promotion.  Instead, create another article.

I am betting that this "author" is not authorized to be offering links for a fee in Huffington Post articles.

So, you might pay $1000 for this link and be told that it is permanent, but this person does not own the Huffington Post website, then the site owners or staff can take his article down at any time or remove this link at any time.

Also, if that author offers to make links for the wrong person and they report him to the Huffington Post, he will be fired, and all of his links will come down.

Ask him how the check should be payable and then you will find out if he is the link seller or if HuffPost is the link seller.

Mine will still be there when I attend my funeral.

Thanks for sharing your observations.   I have not seen this, but I only have this type of ad in a few locations that were created for their current purpose at the start.   I will watch for this problem.  Good to know.

Set the line item "Type" to "Sponsorship".

Then set "Goal" to "100%".