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Not really so. In fact you need to use also the rel="canonical". In order to not get you confused, I really suggest you to follow the implementations steps presented by Tim Grice in this post published on SEOWizz: http://www.seowizz.net/2012/02/consolidating-link-signals-international-link-building-just-got-easier-maybe.html

Hi, I believe, and have seen many others here with the same opinion...  find this is a very unreliable way to see links, it is usually very outdated, and a very small percentage of your link portfolio if any. Personally, I would take operator link: results with a grain of salt. w00t! Shane

TANKS!

First, the site structure you're proposing sounds fine.  The shorter URLs with just the country code look better to me, but I'd lowercase the country codes. Second, there are a few things you can do to make sure the search engines are doing the right thing with respect to content for different countries.  You can set you location target for each directory within Google Webmaster Tools in Site configuration > Settings.  You can also set language metadata, or set HTTP headers to clue in Bing as to what language and country the page is targeting (see http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx). Even though these are targeted to different countries, they show up to the search engines as duplicate content since the content is so similar, and until recently there wasn't much that could be done about it.  You could either rel=canonical to the page that caters to your main audience, or just accept that there would be some duplicate content.  Google recently announced support for a rel=alternate tag which should help to mitigate this.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  The tl;dr of this is you can set rel=alternate tags to signal which pages are alternates of each other, and rel=canonical to one preferred version.  When this page would come up in search, it'll use the title and description from the preferred page, but if the searcher is in a country where you have an alternate version, it'll use the URL for the alternate page.  It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

No, unfortunately there is no way to prevent search engine indexation within the tags of your web page.  As you mentioned earlier in your question, you can either utilize the meta robots exclusion tag or the robots.txt file. If you are REALLY intent on blocking indexation of your promotional page and can only use the section, perhaps you can consider using an <iframe>?  For example, create a totally new page with your promotional copy and blocked by robots.txt while ensuring you have NO links pointing to it.  Then on your promotional page use the <iFrame> tag to extract the content from the robots.txt blocked copy.</p> <p>Honestly, I'm not sure if it'll prevent indexation since I've never tried it before but just an idea.</p> <p>Good luck and tell us how it goes if you do! =]</p></iframe>