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To answer on your first question, Google doesn't read this as France or Germany, but that doesn't mean it is bad for your SEO.

For example, having those different subdirectories in one domain can help you get lots of backlinks to one domain instead of backlinks to all your location based domains.

To answer your second question, your URL doesn't do all of your SEO work... If you use the right title tags, urls, on-page elements you can rank with your .com domain for different languages.

Yesterday I analysed a webshop that targets different countries (FR, NL, DE, ENG) but doesn't have different domains for each country and I must say that he was ranking for some competitive terms in several languages. If your overall SEO elements are good to target a certain language or country it doesn't matter that much if it is a .fr or .com/fr

@Stephen,

Seems like we have different experiences with using tabs. We used it on an ecommerce website and it improved the conversion rate. Now we're still testing other layouts but some usability tests showed us that the tabs are helping people find the information they are looking for very fast.

The templates you refer to at unbounce.com aren't product detail pages, they are lead generation or click through pages and they indeed do need a specific design to increase conversions. I do agree with what you say about testing, that's the only way to make descisions based on facts. Testing is continuous process, there are always things to be optimized.

First of all you have to choose what u are going to use www or no-www, then stick to this! I suggest the www version as most of the people use this when typing in urls directly in their browser.

Then go to your Google Webmaster Tools and set your preferred domain to your choice.

Last but not least make sure you have a redirect for the traffic that does use url without www... You can do this with an .htaccess file. This is a small text file that can handle your redirects.

I don't quite understand the other part, do all the domains share the same content? If so, you should use those canonical tags to indicate where the original content comes from...

In my opinion the layout itself doesn't impact the SEO that much, if you take the general on-page SEO rules into account (page title, url, H1, content, images, ...)

If these elements are optimized you should consider optimizing the page for a better conversion rate, and if you look at the two examples you just showed I might imagine that the layout Play uses converts better. We recently did some multivariate testing for a big e-commerce site and ended up with a similar page layout, without hurting SEO rankings. Conversion rate increased 12% to the previous layout.

Whether you look at zappos.com, bol.com, or other e-commerce websites you will almost always see a footer that is full of links to categories & subcategories.

These elements aren't really attractive, and to be honest, I don't think I ever clicked on one of those links because most of the time I don't reach the bottom of such pages.

Why do these companies use these kinds of footers? Is it for SEO purpose,? Are those links passing juice? Aren't those links at the bottom of the page and therefore not that relevant as other links used in paragraphs? Aren't they contributing to too many on-page links? Maybe only use it on homepage?

I'm really looking forward to the opinions of the experts here at the forum...

Bought the SEO Spyglass of SEO Powersuite like 3 months ago and it's a great kickstart for linkbuilding research. I didn't try the other tools in the suite, but if they are as handy to use like Spyglass it's worth every penny.One of the reasons I like their software is also their pricing, it's not recurring so you just buy it once and I'm sure you'll get the ROI soon!