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I think you are missing my point.  The Nail Stickers page does not need to be a list of links to products like your other page as that is not the product you are providing. Make it a page that talks about the differences.  You can make it unique.  Start a campaign about "Friends Don't Let Friends Wear Nail Stickers".  Make it funny even.  Why not show pictures of bad "Nail Stickers" and have users submit.  Think about it and you will be able to setup a separate but complementary page that is different.  Beat your competitors at their own game.

Good stuff--sounds like you're on the right track then, all around.

Interesting note to add to this, I did just notice via Google Webmaster Tools, that our blog had been hacked and 150 or so of our blog posts were injected with hidden link spam.  In webmaster tools it said that the 2nd biggest keyword within our site was Viagra.  So that is definately playing into these drops in rankings I'm guessing within the last couple of months.

I agree with your decision to get back into the hard business of earning links. IMO that is more important than your three questions. **1. Ditching links in the nav....  ** Is anybody clicking those links and processing to cart?  If nobody is doing that then I would ditch them - especially if those pages are not pulling organic SERP traffic. 2. Sub-cats.... I would try this and let sales be the deciding factor.  It might have more impact there than in SEO. 3. Anything else... This niche has become really really competitive since you launched this site.  Everybody is working hard to eat your lunch.  I agree with your analysis that linkbuilding is the urgent need.

That seems like a pretty sensible take by Danny. I would be looking into any site that had 0 TBPR if its been running a while and I know it has a decent link profile

It is unusual to endorse one of the shortest answers on the page, but Axel is to-the-point and, IMO, correct in this case. You don't want to paginate too heavily because that creates more clicks to get to all of your products. In fact, Google even recommends using a View All canonical page if it doesn't affect performance (load time) too much. The first link anchor is what counts so I respectfully disagree with dittoeffect, unless you were to link to the image on the product page from the image on the category page using a Named Anchor hashtag (could be a good thing to test). You don't want a bunch of iframes on your category page either. Keep it simple. You run an honest eCommerce site, not an uber-competitive affiliate website where you have to put links into a redirect script that goes through a directory that's blocked in the robots.txt file, etc... Make the alt text and link text the same unless you are testing the named anchor link idea mentioned above. And as Alan Gray said, test. These are all just opinions based on experience until you test.