International Site, flow of page rank?

[QubaSEO]

OK. I'm working on an international site.

The site is setup with folders for UK, US, AU    e.g www.site.com/UK/index.aspx

The root  (non folder based) is the international version of the site  e.g www.site.com/index.aspx

www.site.com/index.aspx has the lions share of links.

Therefore, the pages immediately linked from www.site.com/index.aspx have page rank distributed between them.

My UK, US and AU home pages are linked via a country selector  from the www.site.com/index.aspx page via an aspx redirect page that 301's to the appropriate country home page. Therefore the home pages of UK, US, AU are recieving some of the 'juice' that is coming in to www.site.com/index.aspx (but only a fraction via the redirect links)

Am I right in thinking that pages on the international version of the site will have much more potential to rank (because of their 'juice') than the pages on UK, US and AU versions of the site?

If so, am I right in thinking that these will tend to rank over the equivalent UK, US and AU versions of the pages in each country version of Google despite having set directory level Geo-targetting in GWT?

[iAnalyst.com]

Why are you doing a 301 redirect instead of just using a link that takes someone directly to the US/UK/AU versions of the site? You see lots of sites doing this at the top of their site with a flag corresponding to the country, etc.

Anyway, is the text on the other sites unique or exact copies of the international? If so you could be causing more harm then good. Ideally you want actual top levle domains, like www.site.co.uk and www.site.com, etc.  Then the text on each TLD should still be somewhat different based on the keywords and differences in language those people use.

You are correct though that your international version will rank better with the set up you have now, despite your folder set up.