I havent had the nerve to move the countries in a seperate subdomain, Ill do that as a last resort. Its probably a bad move not doing it, but Im not sure how the site will react.

And hosting each subdomain in a separate country isn't on.

Just a small point - I believe you can host subdomains in different countries.

Yeah I know :)( but it isn't for the faint hearted , the non techies, or especially those who don't really grasp the difference between subdomain and GeoTLD..it is tricky to set up and have it working right ..and is vulnerable to DNs issues like dns cache "drop outs " etc.. ) that's why I didn't write "can't be done".."not on" in "English English" isn't quite a total "no"..but I could have left that phrase less open to misinterpretation ..mea culpa :)..

That said wheel ;-)..anyone asks how to host subdomains separately and in separate countries from each other ..I'll let you field the questions and supply the tech responses ;-)..I've got a few thousand photos to tweak and optimise and two rugby matches to watch this weekend :))..priorities :)

My results are all over the board with my changes I did above.
One day im up 20% and the next im 20% down. Search engines are doubling up pages even for my 301 redirects. I guess it will take them some time to reconfigure.

It is what it is I guess...........Ill report back again if I see anything positive or negative. Good luck to all.

Well so far I actually saw a decrease in traffic with my above changes. Also I deoptimized my main page which also saw a decrease in traffic. I used a thesaurus to change over seo terms in which I think looks much better and more professional. However there has not been a new Panda update so I guess I have to wait to see if it makes any real impact.

In the long run though I believe my site now looks better for my viewers so I wont change it back either way. Im now focusing on the users and not for seo anymore. Hopefully I will get more repeat visitors and more referrals this way. Its time to think outside of the box.

I still wish I could regain my traffic overnight, but I guess it will take time.

Well Panda must have ran again on Monday because our keywords just took a big hit. After all the work I did and I still get another penalty. However, we are showing in our webmaster tools that our site has 231 missing pages that we have deleted on purpose or moved to a subdomain. This may be causing a problem so I just filed a reconsideration request with Google explaining this. Hopefully they will get back with me to resolve this problem. I would manually remove them but I followed their guidelines at [google.com...]

Oh, I even went as far as hiring content writers to improve my pages.

I give up..............

However, we are showing in our webmaster tools that our site has 231 missing pages that we have deleted on purpose or moved to a subdomain. This may be causing a problem...

It only causes a problem if your site still has internal links pointing to those now-missing pages. Otherwise that crawl errors report is only listed "for your information".

My big concern is that the pages I moved to subdomains that I did not forward. I think Google might think there are duplicate content issues. So my hope is that Google will undo any penalty that this may be causing, if any. Or at least reindex my site from scratch to get rid of dead pages that are still showing in serps.

If I have a directory that is www.widgets.com/ca/ should it contain a index page for each directory? And does it affect rankings at all?

Im getting a 403 html error for www.widgets.com/ca/ in my webmaster tools and dont use index.html pages in my country specific directories, so that is why I wondering.