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Definitely your language used in your URLs should reflect the country/language you are targeting. If, for example, you saw a search result in US SERPs but the language URL was in Spanish, I'm pretty certain most people would be less inclined to click on the result.
If you have access to the site analytics I would advise that you take a look at the habits of users coming to the site. Have a look at the reasons they are coming to the site, what pages are they visiting, and what pages are they exiting on. Only by knowing what the user intentions are can you truly ensure that the site is designed with the user in mind.
Make sure that you make accessible as possible the very things that visitors are wanting to see. Of course making a site responsive will pay dividends, but you still have to make sure that the site infrastructure makes it easy for users to find the very things they are seeking.
This is very much a question we have been considering for one of our sites and I very much agree with Chammy, that it is very much a resource issue. If you have the resource to provide unique content for each separate domain, build links, do social activity for each one then local domains are perhaps the way to go.
For us, trying to maintain multiple domains would have been too labor intensive and we found that consolidating all our activity into one global .com site has had a positive benefit in that there has been an upturn in overall search traffic, likely caused by consolidation of all the ranking factors to one domain.
One of our sites dropped 3 points for DA at the last Mozscape index so you are not alone. And this occurred at at time when our search traffic has been growing considerably and we are performing better for the majority of our keywords than we have for some time. For this reason I'm not unduly worried and considering it just to be a fluctuation which will probably improve in due course.
In fact, having looked at our competitors which I've been tracking for comparison, I've also seen that all of them have also experienced a similar fall in this latest index update.
Choosing to leave a redirect as a 302 is not a major issue as it's not going to have any major effect other than, as you rightly say, preventing full flow of link juice to the new page. However, it is worth considering that while you may not wish to rank for this page you are unnecessarily wasting link juice, however minimal.
In theory, if you're not overly concerned about rank for this page you could noindex it. The page, although not indexed, would still accumulate page rank (if you changed to a 301) which you could pass internally to other pages in your site. A noindex page can still accumulate and pass pagerank as this old but still relevant article attests. Really though leaving the 302 in place is not going to be a problem if you decide the benefit of changing it would be minimal.
I agree, this is not an issue. It merely tells search engines which page is the 'canonical' version you want displayed in search. In fact I've seen it recommended that sites can use a self referential canonical in order that it affords some 'protection' for your pages from content scrapers which automatically steal content.
Quality over quantity is definitely the order of the day, but before you drop some content completely, take a look at it and see if there is some useful info contained in it which could be consolidated into some of the content that you are actually retaining. Overall though a good content audit can be a good thing even if it means dropping some pages. Here's a useful article regarding content audits which is well worth taking a look at.
You could use hreflang in this instance. It is suitable for content on separate domains as this FAQ link attests. I would steer clear of using the canonical when using hreflang. Check out this previous thread on Moz where use of hreflang and canonical was discussed by me and others.
I use Inspyder. We have a pretty big site containing lots of user generated content and it seems to manage the task pretty well. The only difficulty I have is understanding their rules of how to set which folders to ignore so I have to resort to manual removal of some URLs after the main crawl.
I think hreflang is intended for your very situation. Check out Google's guidelines which will very much confirm this. What you should do is reference both the UK and US URL on both versions of the content, so for example you would add this to both versions.
If you intend to have a default 'en' version which doesn't target any specific locale then you might want to add as well.
Ideally, of course, as Lesley suggests, you should provide content that is unique in each locale, but resource-wise this is not always possible and that is why hreflang will help you in this instance and will help avoid duplicate issues. In theory your US URL should appear in Google.com and your UK URL should appear in Google.co.uk, but it can take a while for Google to catch up and reflect this in SERPs.
Although not related directly to data highlighter for products, I have used data highlighter for events. Like James says, Google seems to have a problem identifying a set even though I've added multiple examples. I terms of performance, it's only been a month or so since it was set up but there has been no discernable impact so far.
Take a look at this video from Matt Cutts outlining their position on translated content.
In addition, as to the question of canonical element and hreflang you'll see that Google removed this portion from their guidelines with an update saying 'to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.' Check out the piece for the current position.
I also had advice direct from Christopher Semturs from Google who said directly to me "the golden rule I personally recommend to everybody using hreflang: In doubt, don't use rel-canonical."
Since Google does not view translated content as duplicate I would suggest that you would only need to specify the alternate language versions of the same language. For example on your France, Switzerland and Belgium pages using hreflang to specify all 3 alternate French language versions, and then doing the same for your German language pages, English language pages etc. You would not need to reference all alternative URLs regardless of language.
Using hreflang in this way should ensure that your intended version is displayed in the correct country SERPs. This is usually the case although on occasions I have found that the international versions may occasionally be shown in the UK instead of the UK version, but these occasions are rare.
Using robots.txt is perhaps not the best way of doing it. Using the canonical or a noindex meta tag would likely be best. I think the reasons for this are best summed up in this article which explains, probably better than I could, why robots.txt is not the best way of dealing with duplicate content. Hope this helps.
Why not use a cross-domain canonical whereby you reference the pages on your primary website as the canonical version on your secondary websites, thereby eliminating the duplication.
For example on each page that is duplicate on your secondary website you would add the following to the head to reference the primary pages:
I would suggest that this isn't really an issue so long as you only place a small snippet (such as the first paragraph) of the post on your e-commerce site. Just think how many blogs work - they will have a main blog page which usually contains the first few lines of each post with a link to take you to view each of the individual posts.
Take a look at Rand's blog for example http://moz.com/rand/
Here you will find snippets of each blog post but then a link to view the entire post on it's own URL. This isn't really considered duplicate because only a small portion of each blog post is present on the main blog page itself. The same applies in your case, even though they are on different domains.
Redirecting multiple pages to one page is ok so long as there is relevance, after all you want to send your users to somewhere that is of use to them. What you don't want to do is just point all 404s to one page such as your home page.
I think the whole redirect issue was expertly covered by Cyrus recently in this great blog post.
If I understand your situation correctly then this could well be an opportunity to implement hreflang. This would ensure the correct version appears in search and you would avoid potential duplication issues. It doesn't matter if you content is in different languages or the same language with different countries being targeted, hreflang will be relevant.
Check out http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
I'm in complete agreement that a 301 instead of a 302 is the best practice here, but wanted to point out that 302s do not necessarily pass no page rank at all. Check out this test study by Geoff Kenyon which dispels the theory that 302 pass no page rank at all, but clearly 301 is preferable in most cases.
I think the best thing to consider is what is best for your users rather than a search engine. If having a mobile version improves their user experience then great.
Google have expressed a preference for responsive over mobile but again you have to think are your users best served by a mobile (and possibly scaled back version) of your site.
There have been some great blogs on Moz on the whole mobile issue which I think you should check out.
http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design