you took offense for how I communicated, and for that I apologize.  However if you read the opening of my initial response, I stated that what I was going to write was a more complete response because over-simplification is very dangerous in our industry. People make jumps and leaps of assumption all too often when they don't have a more thorough understanding of the nuances of acceptable vs unacceptable.

this is a matter of semantics. Attempting to rank multiple sites for the same phrase IS a spam tactic, and thus a site WILL be penalized for it if that's the intent. I've done audits on enough sites that had been penalized and came to me for help as a result that I know this to be true.

Actually the correct deeper answer based on both Google policies and SEO best practices is as follows:

1. It is directly against Google's terms of service to attempt to rank multiple sites for the same phrases.
2. When you have more than one site that contains content that directly competes against any other site, whether its a site you own or someone else owns, or even other content on your own site, Google's multi-algorithm system attempts to determine which site deserves the higher ranking for a particular phrase or search query.  In that process their system attempts to then determine whether any of those shouldn't even be indexed, let alone show up in search results.
3. Based on these considerations, any of your content could quite possibly suffer from either a loss of position it should otherwise deserve, or even have some or all of its content deindexed.  And in a worst case scenario, you could be penalized as well.

SO - the only issue then is this - WHY would you want multiple sites? Do any of the following reasons match your vision? If so, then you CAN have multiple sites IF they are done properly.

A) If you've got a big active brand, with a lot of customers/clients, it can help to create multiple sites often including:

• Corporate Site
• eCommerce Site
• Careers Site
• Community Site
• Charitable Giving Site
• Customer Support Site

B) If you have specific separate and quite distinctly different service or product offerings, you can create multiple sites so that the very different topical intent of each site is kept uniquely refined in that specific funnel and doesn't "pollute" or "dilute" the umbrella topical focus of each niche.

C) If you have an eCommerce site (where intent is online sales) you may have a desire to have a separate community or blog site (where intent is informational) as another way to keep the "intent" funnels cleanly separated.

NOTE:

It is VITAL that you understand the concept that when executed properly, multiple sites are very useful. However, these need to factor in the following:

1. Every site needs to be able to pass the "5 Super-Signals" test:

• Quality
• Uniqueness
• Authority
• Relevance
• Trust

In regard to the above, content needs to be truly unique across each site. While you can have similar content specific to your brand identity, and even some similarity about the umbrella topic of your product or service offerings, this needs to be done in a way that does not violate the "multiple sites for ranking domination" except as it relates to your brand (as opposed to generic non-brand product or service offerings).

2. Each site needs to have a LEGITIMATE business case reason for its existence not considering SEO - the "why this site exists" question needs to pass muster.

3. Every additional site you create requires its own consistent quality effort, as well as trustworthy off-site reinforcement. If a proper concerted effort cannot be maintained over the long-haul on multiple sites, it is much wiser to go with one single unified site.

I really like Dana's response - it covers the primary consideration - how much time would it REALLY take to write unique Meta descriptions? If the TRUE answer is "unrealistically too much time", then a template COULD work. The trick though is addressing the issues Dana talks about.

If you only use a primary product name as the variable, you run risks. If you have a 2nd database field you have that includes some differentiation between otherwise identical products, that can help.  As long as you understand total length as a consideration.

Oliver,

Thank you for pointing out this "exception" to the Schema placement rule.  As is the case with any structured markup solution, there will, from time to time, be cases where certain, specific elements go in the "head" section of the code.  Anything that applies to an individual page in its entirety, and does not limit itself to an element of content within the page does, in fact, belong in the "head" area of the page code.

The most important factor here is the notion that you can go to one source for a high volume of links where the cost per link is next to nothing.  We can argue about what "next to nothing" means, however essentially if any link is not placed on a site or directory where the quality, uniqueness, authority, relevance or trust of that site / directory are strong, that individual link is suspect.

While it can be argued that a new site / directory doesn't yet have authority and thus such a site /directory can still be okay to get a link from, it means the other four signals need to be that much stronger to compensate for that lack of authority.

If the company claiming to offer these services is willing to provide you a spreadsheet listing all the directories they intend to get links for you, go ahead and look at some of those and judge for yourself.

Directories are held to an even higher standard in regard to relevance and trust because the overwhelming majority of "directories" out there are craptastic bogus scams created purely for SEO.

Of the hundreds of thousands of links I have reviewed during client audits this year, I can assure you only a small fraction of links from directories were real, and even a smaller fraction of those provided any value.

Do not get caught up in marketing nonsense.  Everything you listed in their claims about why you should trust them is a massive red flag to me that you'll get ripped off.

On a final note, while I am delighted that the previous answers here paved the warning way before I joined this discussion, I need to speak up about the potential for harm.  The potential for a penalty here is ALARMINGLY HIGH.

Relying on directory links from a company like the one that pitched you is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS in 2013. Most of the site owners who hire me to do a forensic audit have been penalized manually or algorithmically and most of those have had ugly directory link based inbound link profile madness.

I'm with Ash on the Internationalization strategy. I would also suggest that if you go with domain.com/countryspecificsection/ then each country specific section should have it's on country / language specific structured markup and Meta data assignment. This will help ensure Google doesn't have to figure it out on their own (because they are a gambler's nightmare as to how they can get mixed signals wrong).

Drew,

Thanks for emphasizing the resource allocation consideration. I mentioned it only in a minor way, yet it really is a critical consideration.

The founding principle to SEO is brand identification. The more you do to model your web presence after successful major brands, the more you will naturally earn trust and authority big brands earn. That in turn boosts all other aspects of SEO.

To achieve this specific to subsidiaries, you establish a parent company corporate site, and a stand-alone domain for each subsidiary.  Every site however, needs to utilize the most sustainable SEO methods possible. You can't just slap up sites with a few pages and expect them to rank or pull in highly qualified visitors without serious focus.

Only link back to the parent company site and other subsidiary sites from your "About", and "Contact" sections unless you believe it's valuable from a visibility perspective to link from every page. HOWEVER if you link from every page, they should be nofollow links. if you do mass volume links from site to site and they're not nofollowed, that leaves you highly exposed to potential algorithm penalties.

If you want each subsidiary to succeed as its own brand you will need separate social channels for each as well.  Again though, they'll only be helpful long-term if you have the resources to maintain them in quality engagement ways.

There are many other rules and guidelines (like "keep duplication of content to as near zero as possible") however that's the core concept that addresses your question here.

Sitelinks are "earned" with a high quality site that communicates brand trust and where Google determines "these pages are the most visited pages".  Having proper information architecture and navigational breadcrumbs (RDFa or Schema) can sometimes help because they reinforce content relationships, however they're not required to obtain sitelinks.