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Hi Roger, I was doing research today on the exact same topic, you might want to see this video from Google's Matt Cutts first http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

We have set up each site in the same webmaster tools account and have also used the tool to select which market we wish to target with the site i.e. .com is set to US only and .com/uk is set to UK only. If you land on the .com for the first time, it will show a lightbox (javascript enabled) that lets you choose which site you wish to view. This lightbox has a no index, do follow robots tag included to ensure it passes all link juice. As per my previous comment... I would go for a local TLD over a .com/uk or subdomain approach every day of the week, especially when you have different countries that speak the same language.

The answer is NO, there is no inherent risk of ranking loss or credibility loss when redirecting old URL's. Think of it like the post office, lets say you move a lot and as a result you have become very familiar with their change of address form. The post office isn't going to delay the delivery of your mail just because your Dads in the military or your Mom keeps moving to escape old flames. Relocating is a part of life and when it comes down to it the Post Office and Google, for that matter, thank you for 301'ing your mail so it doesn't stack up and clutter the Index with undeliverables.

Thanks Alan and Richard. That's just the sort of confirmation I was hoping for.

We'll be using IIS, but I suppose it works the same way. It's my hope to get this done with one small change and not have to update an entire database of thousands of pages. Can that not be done?

Thank you everyone for the help. I feel confident that we can just continue on like we are, and if I notice any issues, then I can try your suggestions of the keyword order and also following the examples of that blog post. Thanks again!

Rand talks about URL shorteners and their effect on link juice etc here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-anyway-for-redirected-links-to-still-provide-seo-value - Very good info (as you would expect from the bearded one...)

That was my thought process as well. Thanks Alan!

Most assuredly use different CC-TLDs! I would also point to each from each as you have seen on many global sites. This will allow you to use different keywords also as Europe and the US have different spellings for the same words. So make sure your shopping cart software allows this if you are using the same across all domains. This will help in link building also as it would be harder to get a spanish website linking to an english website even with sub domains.

Do you recall what the cost was? I'm considering it for a few of our clients.

Great info!  Thanks.

I regularly post new 200 level pages to my site, so I guess I'm most interested in getting new links.  However, I do see the point that Alan is making as well.  Thanks to both of you for taking the time to answer this.

I did this accidentally as well recently and had 100% of my products disallowed from google shopping within 48 hours. Sounds like it's not an option. They need the crawl your images folder to make sure you have valid images in you product listings.