No problem, people sharing knowledge is what makes a community great.

To answer your question I missed above, Prestashop is free, all you need it web hosting.

Tom,

What we do with most of our clients is to point the canonical tag on paginated category pages to the root category page like you are wanting to do. It helps with duplicate content issues generated for category pages and also makes your landing page stronger. I would not use the rel next/previous with this though.

If you look around the industry at the bigger ecommerce sites this is what is done. Walmart, Target, and all of the big players with the exception of Amazon use this practice.

I have become frustrated at MOZ in the last few months, none of my backlinks have made it into the index. Old back links. Long story short, I figured out the issue and I figured out how anyone can manipulate their DA. I wrote a blog post about it here, http://blog.dh42.com/manipulate-moz/

I have had a couple of clients that use this system, https://tapfiliate.com/integrations/wordpress-affiliate-marketing/  They seem to like it well enough.

Does the platform you are using let you select a default category for the product? Several platforms will let you select multiple categories and make you chose one as a default category. If so, you can just work off the uri of the page and insert the default category as the canonical category in the rel=canonical.

In that case, use a canonical url and you should be fine. Have the canonical point to the page with no query string on it. You had me worried, I thought you might have a platform that needed the parameters to show products, then you mentioned you took them out in GWT. I have seen clients do that on the platforms that need the query strings and de-index all of their product pages.

I might have used a bad example with Rand, but it is amazing how many companies take paid posts or reviews. Places like Allure, Vogue, Huff Post, NY Times, ect. What you are really hitting is the demographic that thinks they are reading something that is impartial, but in reality they are just being advertised to under the guise of "News". I always make sure the link is nofollow, so I do not really consider it blackhat, be shakey marketing, maybe. But in the end it comes down to dollars and cents. I regularly have posts that are paid in the 500-1000usd range. When you first do it, it is a leap, because there is no SEO value at all. But the largest return I have had was a post that in 3 days grossed 50k in sales on high margin products. The posts usually die fast, because people want the latest greatest thing. But they end up getting shared and work for the most part generally.