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I'd give it a month before you'll see that bounce back. I wouldn't expect the same rankings as before as Google will be reevaluating your pages, but you should have a pick up in traffic.

Yep, only first link counts. So it is important that it's a text link!  A common problem is that people have a product image that links as the first link on the page to that URL.. with a text link below.. not good...

Geotargeting is not uncommon and the search engines are pretty good at negotiating sites using it, depends on your implimentation though. We use geotargeting of users on our site to send users to /country/ based on their IP, with a few conditions. Users are only redirected when coming to the homepage, either as direct or from search. If a user from France is coming to the main dot com we'll send them to the /fr/ site automatically. If the user tries to get to the homepage via a search engine we redirect them to the appropriate language site. This is because the main dot com often shows up above or near the /country/ sites in search, especially for brand terms. If a user has been given a subpage for a search (e.g. site/cat/page/) then they won't be redirected as we assume the search engines have done a decent enough job at matching them to a page they want. Users/bots can override the routing. Users can internally navigate to other languages through the language menu. If we send somebody in France to the French site, but they only speak English, instantly forcing them back to the /fr/ site will just frustrate them. Link to the other language sites on your pages and check referral headers, if internal do not redirect. All language folders are specified in WMT and it definitely works. So Google comes in to the dot com, in the header there is a link to the /us/, so they'll crawl down that link getting both versions of the sites in their index. You biggest challenge here is getting the /us/ ranking above the dot com in the USA, which will require some creative link building Make sense?